A Walsall poet who organised the first Art Meets Poetry event at The Crossing, St Paul`s in Walsall with the Walsall Society of Artists and The New Art Gallery has been published in a book celebrating ekphrastic poetry.    

  Ian Henery attended a course, funded by West Midlands Combined Authority at the Newhampton Arts Centre in Wolverhampton to explore how buildings could be used for cultural activities.  This then led to a partnership with The Crossing at St Paul`s Church, a Christian Social Enterprise, to use their facilities for arts and culture.  The challenge was to increase the number of community groups using The Crossing and turn it into not only a hive of activity but also a centre of cultural and artistic expertise in the same way as the New Art Gallery and the forthcoming craftmakers`guild at the former Guild Hall in Walsall.    

"Ekphrastic poetry is an exciting literature form which engages with paintings, drawings, sculptures and other forms of visual art" said Ian Henery who organised the event with Walsall Society of Artists and local poets.  

 "The earliest ekphrastic poems were accounts of real or imagined scenes but the desire was to unleash their potential for wider use and not simply the visual or verbal formats." explained Ian Henery.          

The project was held at The Crossing for 6 weeks in 2023  before being transferred for 3 months to The New Art Gallery in Walsall.  A seperate offshoot of the project was organised with fellow poet Brendan hawthorne and artists Jason Fullwood, Steven C Davis and Al Monde for Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the 2024 Wolverhampton Literature Festival.  The project was called "The Art of Words" and that collaboration is now the subject of a newly published hardback book.    

  "Ekphrastic poetry is an exciting literature form which engages with paintings, drawings, sculptures and other forms of visual art" said Ian Henery.  "The earliest ekphrastic poems were accounts of real or imagined scenes but the desire was to unleash their potential for wider use and not simply the visual or verbal formats."       

The book, in handback, is published by Tenebrous Texts and is called "Tenebrosian Ekphrasticity" and collects together the artwork of the five creatives in 91 pages of poetry and art.      

"It was an honour to be published in this book" said ian Henery "alongside Brendan Hawthorne and the artists.  This is a top notch book".