Pembroke College Cambridge

The Barrie Cooke Archive Opens

Wednesday 23 February 2022

By Dr Mark Wormald

Pembroke College is delighted to announce the opening today of the internationally significant literary archive of the British-born expressionist artist Barrie Cooke (1931-2014), fisherman and friend of poets, and an associated collection of 150 images he made in response to their work. Cooke moved to Ireland in 1954, and the archive represents an extraordinary record of creative collaboration across geographical borders as well as between visual and literary art.

Barrie Cooke stood on Yeats' Grave, 2012. Photo by Mark Wormald
Barrie Cooke in 2012. Photo by Mark Wormald

 

The papers were acquired in 2020 thanks to the generosity of the College’s alumni and friends and a number of major national funding bodies: The Friends of the National Libraries, National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, Arts Council England/V &A Purchase Grant Fund, Old Possum’s Practical Trust and the Duke of Devonshire’s Charitable Trust

Our Archivist and Librarian, with the Cambridge Colleges’ Conservation Consortium, have stabilized the papers and artwork, and published an online catalogue, available here; we welcome requests from researchers who wish to consult the archive’s contents in its permanent home, the Pembroke College Archive. 

We are committed to holding a series of public exhibitions and a programme of public events, in partnership with interested institutions in Cambridge and beyond, in coming years, following the opening of a new gallery on Trumpington Street in 2023.

Barrie Cooke’s closest friends were poets: Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Pembroke alumnus and Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, and distinguished Irish poet John Montague each exchanged dozens of letters, poems and other writing with Cooke over four decades, often sharing drafts and their creative dilemmas.  He was much more than a fine reader and illustrator. His unique aesthetic vision and the confidence he placed in them inspired them to write. They shared his passion for the life of water; time in his company was restorative, always under the surface of their public lives. 

Barrie Cooke, ‘Seamus Heaney poem’ (2005), reproduced with permission of The Estate of Barrie Cooke
Barrie Cooke, ‘Seamus Heaney poem’ (2005), reproduced with permission of The Estate of Barrie Cooke

 

The hospitality Cooke and his partner of twenty years, renowned Dutch ceramicist Sonja Landweer, offered them in successive homes beside the River Nore was vivid and sustaining. The archive also contains poems and letters from Cooke’s third wife the American poet Jean Valentine, and a remarkable guestbook of their years in County Sligo.  

Cooke’s wider circle included many more Irish, British, European, American and Mexican poets, writers, painters and sculptors: among dozens of correspondents are Paul Durcan, Peter Fallon, Brian Friel, John McGahern, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Dervla Murphy, Richard Murphy, Nuala Ni DhomThe Ohnaill, Edna O’Brien, Dennis O’Driscoll, Sorley Maclean, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown, Louis Le Brocquy, Nick Miller, Dorothy Cross, Bernadette Kiely, Paul Mosse, Jack Sweeney, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Tess Gallagher, Raymond Carver, Pura Lopez Colomé, Judith Herzberg, Keith Sagar and Bill Woodrow. 

Crow by Barrie Cooke. Reproduced with the permission of The Barrie Cooke Estate
Crow by Barrie Cooke. Reproduced with the permission of The Barrie Cooke Estate

 

Following the acquisition of the archive, it was enlarged shortly thereafter by donations: Cooke’s characteristically vivid letters to the leading Irish artist Paul Mosse, as well as two letters from Sonja Landweer to Mosse. The archive has also prompted the donation to the College of a copy of a poem by Ted Hughes in memory of Stanley Rivlin, who fished with Hughes. 

The Barrie Cooke Archive itself complements and significantly extends the College’s existing collection of material relating to the life and work of Ted Hughes, from stained glass windows to fishing tackle and furniture acquired and loaned in recent years. The College Library and Archive is already home to a remarkable collection of Hughes’s printed works and manuscripts, personally inscribed to his friend Roy Davids; other rare editions of his work, including a copy of Hughes’s first fine press edition Animal Poems (1967), inscribed to the author’s son Nicholas; artwork and correspondence relating to George Adamson’s collaboration with Hughes on his children’s books Meet My Folks!, The Iron Man and How the Whale Became; products of his collaboration and friendship with American artist Leonard Baskin; and collections of ephemera and working critical notes donated by Hughes’s sister Olwyn and by the scholar Ann Skea. As well as twenty-eight letters and cards and fifteen poems by Hughes, written between 1962 and 1997, Cooke’s archive includes a remarkable sketchbook of images and notes made in preparation for a suite of lithographs accompanying Hughes’s poem ‘The Great Irish Pike’ (1982), a copy of which was generously donated to the College  in 2012. It also includes Cooke’s drawings, notes and enamels for the 1972 Claddagh Records album of Hughes’s reading of his 1970 collection Crow

"Barrie Cooke's sketch notes for 'Crow' by Ted Hughes, reproduced the permission of The Barrie Cooke Estate
Barrie Cooke's reading notes for 'Crow Goes Hunting' by Ted Hughes, reproduced with the permission of The Barrie Cooke Estate

 

Hero image: Two poems by Seamus Heaney, inscribed in the guest book of Barrie Cooke and Jean Valentine, 23 August 1990. Credit: The Heaney Estate. Photograph by Mark Wormald

 

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