your eye protects the soft-toed snowdrop

Our shared values of harmony and love have sustained our friendship for over ten creative years. We both hope you will have many happy hours revisiting this collection life long. When I had written your eye protects the soft-toed snowdrop the words looked so lost on the page that I asked Romit to illustrate it. We continue to collaborate because we enjoy creating an extraordinary presentation of life experienced by us all - both joy and sadness are celebrated here as creative equals.  

Helen Pletts

Since 2011, when Ink Sweat & Tears (inksweatandtears.co.uk) first began publishing Word & Image by Helen Pletts and Romit Berger online, their work has been a touchstone, a point of reference for all other features of this kind on IS&T.

Each Word & Image exemplifies a profound, symbiotic relationship that transcends the merely professional. The pair’s friendship shines out and is intrinsic to their work together. Helen’s very personal poetry reveals her strong connection to the natural world while also laying herself open emotionally. She writes with a thoughtful, mesmerising delicacy on love and death, on joy and need, illness and exhaustion. A less subtle artist might resort to cliché but, instead, Romit takes Helen’s words and releases them into the atmosphere with images and colours of exquisite beauty. The effect is deeply moving and magical. But the import remains; the intent is never lost. 

At Ink Sweat & Tears, we have long thought that Pletts & Berger’s Word & Image was meant to be seen on the printed page and we were thrilled when we heard that Gama Press were going to publish your eye protects the soft-toed snowdrop, the title of the piece that opens the book, their first work together and the first we published over a decade ago. 

This collection is the result of years of collaboration and love. We  cannot  recommend  it  highly  enough.

Kate Birch