An Ear
A collaboration from AV Nicoll & Michael Turek
hangs in the dark space
I see over your shoulder.
What can you hear
washing through all that emptiness?
The darkness is only growing colder.
Can you tell?
No man wants this dryness.
The wildness is too wild,
the day too long
and the night’s coldness is too cold
for a fire that has no life left to burn.
There is no one here,
not even me
But the sand,
it can hear my art
piling up
and piling up
the soundless
solitude of the human heart.
About the piece:
This week, The Marlowe Review returns to a collaboration with writer, poet, and traveller Alastair Vere Nicoll, joined here by award-winning documentary photographer Michael Turek. Together, they present a piece - through Vere Nicoll’s poem and Turek’s imagery, photographed on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast - centred on the act of listening, both inwardly and outwardly. Poem and image work in parallel, using restraint, suggestion, and what is left unsaid to carry meaning.
This is the first of two instalments from Vere Nicoll and Turek, reflecting the long-term collaborative friendship they share.
A Note on the Photographer:
Michael Turek is an award-winning British-American photographer who focuses on documentary assignments for clients including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He has worked extensively in challenging environments, most recently in Iraq and Tajikistan. His book, CONTRAIL, published by Roman Nvmerals in 2021, is included in the MoMA Archives and Library. His first photographic monograph, SIBERIA was published by Damiani in 2020 — the culmination of three years’ work in Russia with long-time collaborator, writer Sophy Roberts, which received global TV, radio and print coverage. He is currently working on two long-term documentary projects in East Africa and northern England.
A Note on the Author:
AV Nicoll was born in Johannesburg and went to school in Australia, before moving to London as a teenager. After studying English Literature at Oxford University, he became a lawyer and then a developer of renewable energy plants in emerging markets including Madagascar, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Angola, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippine and India.
In 2005 Nicoll sledged and kite-surfed across the continent of Antarctica. Over the last five years he’s been writing a travel book about post-conflict zones which has taken him to Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea, Algeria, Kurdistan, Mauritania and Iraq, often travelling to these ambivalent, red-listed destinations and observing them through the lens of local poetry. In places where the authorities strangle expression, often the only way to be heard is obliquely - through art, through metaphor. Seeing by looking away.