Second Project: North Book Cover (Updated)

For this unessay assignment I wanted to focus on some of the poetry we read this semester. I felt there was some intense imagery in poems by authors like Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, and Sylvia Plath so I wanted my unessay to have some visual aspect. I decided to focus on Seamus Heaney’s poems and create a book cover for his North collection. I took inspiration from the poems we were assigned this semester, like Bog Queen, as well as some of the other poems in this collection.

Come to the Bower, Bog Queen, and Punishment were the three poems I found worked with the ideas I had for the cover. I knew I wanted to include some sort of bog body since they are so prevalent in the entire collection. And I already had a color palette in mind of dark blues and swampy greens, something I felt reflected the tone of the collection. Unfortunately I am not the best artist so my vision for the cover did not come out completely as planned due to my lack of skill when it comes to drawing. Specific things like the description of corpses, peat moss, and swampy water I could not figure out how to draw so they were replaced with other things. Peat moss became grass for example.

There are specific lines from some of the poems that I used to create the cover. From Come to the Bower I took inspiration from the lines “Foraging past the burst gizzards/Of coin-hoards/To where the dark-bowered queen/Whom I unpin/Is waiting. Out of the black maw/Of the peat, sharpened willow/Withdraws gently”.“Out of the peat, sharpened willow withdrawals gently” I used this to decide what kind of greenery to include. The sharp willow turned into sharp grass and the “dark-bowered queen” is in the water. From Punishment the lines “I can see her drowned/body in the/bog,/the weighing stone” is represented by the body in the water. Bog Queen also includes some imagery of bog bodies “I was barbered/and stripped/by a turfcutter’s spade/who veiled me again/and packed coomb softly/between the stone jambs/at my head and my feet”. I wanted to put the woman in the water and tucked into the greenery, as well as, include a nod to Heaney’s descriptions of bog bodies which often include or reference some aspect of hair. I decided to place her under a small mound because I felt like a lot of the poems about bog bodies have a secretive or mysterious nature to them, therefore I wanted her to be somewhat hidden. I think the cover I created represents the tone of the North Collection quite well. If I were to make any revisions to the cover I think I would try and make it a little bit more eerie or spooky. As I stated before I am not the best artist so it’s difficult to make my entire vision come to life however I am pleased with this cover. I enjoyed reading about Seamus Heaney and his poems, they were certainly some of my favorites from the semester. The North collection includes some great work and was my first introduction to “bog bodies” which I have found quite interesting. I would definitely recommend this collection to anyone who likes strange, emotional, and eerie poetry and would be interested to hear others’ visions of what the cover could look like. 

I created this cover using the Procreate app. It was created in a photoshop collage type of way. I used google images as references and traced outlines to create different shapes. I would then resize, edit, duplicate, and move them on the canvas and between the layers. I played around with the colors on some layers and created overlays with the hope of adding dimension. This cover was a lot of fun to create. Below I’ve included some images I used as inspiration and some I used as the basis of some elements of my cover.

Sources:

Poems: https://wordandsilence.com/2016/06/03/heaneys-bog-poems/

Background on Heaney and Poems: https://fawbie.info/category/north/

Cover Inspirations from Google Images of Cartoon nature and bodies

https://www.canstockphoto.com/fetal-pose-woman-90569400.html

https://www.istockphoto.com/illustrations/bog-cartoons

https://www.dreamstime.com/cartoon-grass-canes-bump-swamp-frogs-lilies-image102493097

https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/woman-in-swimming-suit-on-beach-flat-illustration-gm1160170878-317484201

Image Inspiration: