I Live in Love-Longing

Notes

I Live in Long-Longing was inspired by author Dennis Hamley’s updated English rendering of the British Library’s mediaeval manuscript ‘To Alysoun’, a minstrel’s lyric most likely put to paper by the Ludlow Scribe between 1290 and 1350. Despite the intervening centuries, the lyric still speaks clearly of the pains of a man as he awaits his love. I chose to accentuate the pent-up ecstasy of her arrival, which lies beneath the text, with a teasing out of adjacent words in unexpected pairings.