Doors and sand
AV Nicoll & Michael Turek
A cabin tilts at a diamond
and through its tending window,
I see a ceaseless sky.
The heart here is dry.
It’s a land of corners
and blue fallen shadows.
The doorway’s filled with sand
and through its unhinged frame
still another has tumbled on its heel.
The red ground is naked with lost footsteps
and the heart’s paint has turned to peel.
One day its tombstone doors,
propped up by sand,
will sink and lie beneath.
And the corridor,
through which the wind expands,
will soon forget to breathe.
On that pale floor
a ruined galleon gasps,
its spars curled into ribs
picked clean by the wind.
That boat was made to sail on tears,
but blanched on a bed of sand it lies,
submerged beneath the blankest sky.
That wreck I took for real,
tomorrow it will feel.
About the Piece:
The Marlowe Review returns to a collaboration with writer, poet, and traveller AV Nicoll, joined here by award-winning documentary photographer Michael Turek. Together, they present a piece - through Nicoll’s poem and Turek’s imagery, photographed on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast - which moves through abandoned spaces, sand-filled doorways, and the skeletal remains of vessels overtaken by the desert. Together, poem and photograph trace a landscape shaped by time, memory and erosion.
This is the second of two instalments from Nicoll and Turek, reflecting their collaborative friendship through travel writer Sophy Roberts.
A Note on the Photographer:
Michael Turek is an award-winning British-American photographer who focuses on documentary assignments for clients including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He has worked extensively in challenging environments, most recently in Iraq and Tajikistan. His book, CONTRAIL, published by Roman Nvmerals in 2021, is included in the MoMA Archives and Library. His first photographic monograph, SIBERIA was published by Damiani in 2020 — the culmination of three years’ work in Russia with long-time collaborator, writer Sophy Roberts, which received global TV, radio and print coverage. He is currently working on two long-term documentary projects in East Africa and northern England.
A Note on the Author:
AV Nicoll was born in Johannesburg and went to school in Australia, before moving to London as a teenager. After studying English Literature at Oxford University, he became a lawyer and then a developer of renewable energy plants in emerging markets including Madagascar, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Angola, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippine and India.
In 2005 Nicoll sledged and kite-surfed across the continent of Antarctica. Over the last five years he’s been writing a travel book about post-conflict zones which has taken him to Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea, Algeria, Kurdistan, Mauritania and Iraq, often travelling to these ambivalent, red-listed destinations and observing them through the lens of local poetry. In places where the authorities strangle expression, often the only way to be heard is obliquely - through art, through metaphor. Seeing by looking away.