Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's sinister and unsettling Gothic ballad 'Erlkönig' ('The Erl-King', or 'The Elf King', 1782) has haunted artists working in several genres for over two centuries, provoking hundreds of ekphrastic responses, including works by the composer Franz Schubert, the novelist Michel Tournier and the artist Albert Sterner. Poet Steve Ely and artist Alan Parker's collaboration White Pony is the latest work to take its inspiration from Goethe's poem. Parker's distorted and disturbing paintings evoke a world of lurking threat, a crippling awareness of human amorality, and the spectral presence of death-in-the-midst-of-life. Ely's poems, jumping off from Parker's paintings as much as Goethe's poem, apply the nightmare implicit in both to the horrors of the contemporary world. Beginning with a sense of the absolute vulnerability of the child, the sequence expands in scope to encompass content including the Jimmy Savile scandal, the Gazan genocide, racism and misogyny, the corruption of the political class, and the rise of oligarchy and the gangster-terrorist state.
Steve Ely has written thirteen books or pamphlets of poetry since 2013, in the process being nominated for the following awards: the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; the Northern Writer's Award for Poetry; the Laurel Prize; and the ASLE-UKI Book Prize (twice). He has published extensively on the work of Ted Hughes and also writes fiction. He teaches creative writing in a range of university, community and other contexts. He lives in the terra nullius of the South/West Yorkshire borderlands, the setting for much of his work.
Alan Parker was born in 1965 in Woodsetts, Yorkshire, he studied at Barnsley College of Art and then The Royal Academy Schools. He has taught at several school and colleges in the U.K., and was Director of The Leonardo Centre at Uppingham School.Alan Parker's work is not easy to categorise - he is known largely for his English Folk Art sensibilities, describing personal experiences, observations from his rural life, through to images from folk tales, Bible stories, and latterly almost abstract land, sea and skyscapes.Parker describes how he has 'a huge amount of images inside myself' and his art describes this world. Lowry had his Salford, Wallis his St Ives, and Parker his misty, remote Lincolnshire fenland, where he has lived and worked for his adult life.He has had many and varied joint and solo exhibitions in the U.K., Europe and U.S.A., and is represented in many important private and public collections, including The National Portrait Gallery. He has been a visiting artist at Cambridge and Warwick Universities, a Visiting Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, a Leverhulme Scholar, and the recipient of a number of awards and prizes, including The Sunday Times Watercolour Prize, The Royal Watercolour Society President's Prize and The National Portrait Gallery Travel Prize.
