A Songnet Written in the Hopes that the Poet is Sculpting a Sculptor, two Sculptures and Sculpture – and that He’s Not Scalping Them All!

(An Appreciation of Toby Govan and his Work)

February 21

He’s not endowing stone with life; he’s finding it, the life that’s friezed by stone,

Then freeing it; his sculpture is not chiselling that stone, not in either sense,

It’s uncrushing current’s gushing, it’s causing cheeks to blush, it’s sinewing its bone

And enmuscling its skin; it’s depetrifying blood and tears; burlesquing all pretence

That material’s material: the most solid of his concretes are the abstracts they exude:

The carnal ripples hewn therein are far less tangible than the love and energy and care

With which the opus is accomplished, and than with which they are imbued,

But whose splendour only peacocks when of their synergy they are consciously aware.

It is perhaps the aspect most heavenly of sculpture’s highest peaks,

That something so unequivocally so palpable remains essentially a mist

Of sauntering ambivalence, whose directness oft is sneaky, and who in silence speaks:

The sculptor who can encage such wisps, engage with them, is the acme of the artist.

Which Govan is. Indeed I think a summary would say that what’s most conspicuous

About his work is that only in its talent and its beauty is it unambiguous.

Greg Dark