Cassiopeia Lying Eastwards is a work of art, literally. It contains lyrical poetry at its best. Author Mark Whelehan has crafted the text and drawings from his own hand.
Mark uses words as sounds and mental pictures. Emotive verses which reach crescendos of feeling, cadences - rhythmic flows of a sequence of sounds he tries to echo.
This book also contains two poems by his father (Seos Whelehan), published to show, in part, where Mark draws his poetic heritage from.
By studying many forms of poetry, Mark has developed a style built from various forms - from free flow to structured… it may be breaking somebody’s rules, but if it works, then he’s happy.
Mark Whelehan first came across the Vale of Potterne Wick, part of the Pewsey Vale, when walking a beagle dog at the age of ten. He was spellbound by a sea of buttercups drowning everywhere your eye roamed, great waves of yellow and green, licking and lapping the bases of giant, ancient oaks. He would then for many future years walk there with his brother Paul and sisters Danat, Delmar and Colette.
It took him forty-five years to be able to buy a piece of it, at Crookwood, and set about sculpting oak stumps and writing verse… eventually deciding to create ‘Over Crookwood’, published as an eBook on Amazon. This further set of poems includes some of those from ‘Over Crookwood’ plus his own sketches. His sculptures and poem extracts are secreted about the Vale… publicly in; Devizes, Potterne & Urchfont - and privately in various locations. These sculptures have extracts from his poems, mounted on brass plaques and the completed published works relate true love and characters and aspects, he found around here.
These works are all manufactured from the poet, Mark Whelehan’s life interest in astronomy, wildlife and nature and how it all compliments, synchronises and works together to form the place, between imagination and reality, where he finds his peace of mind, his core faith.
Of dawn, he writes…
The man in the moon looks down on me
In my slipshod aqua bed I doze
And only when the malachite of yew and sky meet
There springs a nest of gold spun light
Which emanates from a cluster of far flung planets and stars
Into which a red berry sits like interloping mars
M.W. 2017
