Graham Lambkin - Came To Call MIne Book with CD (Penultimate Press)

Originally released in 2015, a warehouse find of a small amount of the US edition with bonus CD has made it back to us 10 years later.

Came to Call Mine is an extensive full colour art book by visionary musician, artist, and writer Graham Lambkin. Playing out like a children’s book for adults, Came to Call Mine features 50 hand-drawn illustrations coupled with simplistic corresponding texts. Lambkin’s mischievous combination of figurative and abstract elements lends Came to Call Mine a jarring, dreamlike quality, confusing the eye by placing innocent childlike totems against a darker adult undercurrent. Came to Call Mine is released as a deluxe softcover book designed by Maja Larsson, with lithograph printing on Munken pure rough, lynx, and polar paper stock in an edition of 400 copies.

Limited Edition comes with a CD recorded for the USA edition. “C05” presents an 18-minute composition, which draws from the texts and themes of “Came to Call Mine”, presenting a strange lattice of fragmented narration and juvenile musical vision.

“Elegantly presented by designer Maja Larsson, Came To Call Mine initially resembles a children’s book in its combination of short poems and brightly coloured drawings – one on each facing page – and there is something of the Brothers Grimm in the macabre tone and nursery rhyme assonance of the poems. Some read like incantations for folk rituals whose meanings have been obliterated by time, such as Cold Shearing with its obscure instructions and pounding iambic rhythms: “Pike the lamb/And bring the clippers close/Spike the lamb/And crop the mop of wool”. This gives way to the more singsong cadences of limerick poetry in the second half of the the seven-line poem: “A snow goose passing/Decides to see nothing/And vanishes into the gloom”. – The Wire   less