Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Excellent exhibition, but no horse tack in sight.

The lovely people at Dogwood London have invited me to write a guest article on their website - not because of my deep knowledge of horse tack, but because I was getting excited about the recent show at the ICA, called "Poor. Old. Tired. Horse."

The title comes from the name of a visual poetry magazine created by Ian Hamilton Finlay, who in turn took it from a phrase in a poem by Robert Creeley, one of the Black Mountain poets. The resulting show, therefore, has little to do directly with horses - there's quite a distance between the animal in the poem and his eventual appearance in the exhibition, after all - and quite a lot to do with how the way a written work is printed affects the way we read it.



As a practising poet, I get excited about this kind of thing very easily. I know it's not true for everyone; when I tried to tell the Dogwood manager about the exhibition while watching the same dressage event, it initially led to a little gentle teasing, but I stuck to my guns - and once I showed him the online reviews to prove it wasn't just me getting excited, he said I should share that here.



So trust me; if you're the kind of person who appreciates the finer things (and that would be why you are on the Dogwood site, wouldn't it?) this is a fascinating exhibit. The words on show aren't restrained by the same horizontal lines you get on a typical page, or on the internet, but they get to dance.



Almost literally, in some cases; the conical word machines of Lilian Lijn set the words around their surface into motion, making them pirouette before your eyes. When the phrase in motion is "sky never stops", the text offset so that the words move against each other as the cone spins, it's entirely pleasurable to hold a remembered image of the ever-changing sky against the artwork in front of you.



And if a literary professional borrowed by an equestrian site isn't your ideal source of art recommendations to trust, perhaps I can point you at the reviews online? The four-star review in Time Out says "exhibitions director Mark Sladen's careful selection of key works across the genre makes a Tardis of the ICA and the years that separate them concertina like squeezebox bellows." The art journal e-flux calls it "an exhibition of art that verges on poetry", and the Telegraph quotes Ian Hamilton Finlay's comment, with seeming approval, that "If I was asked 'Why do you like concrete poetry?' I could truthfully answer 'Because it is beautiful'."



And beauty catches the eye - just look at the gorgeous leather goods elsewhere on the Dogwood site for evidence of that - so it's a show well worth catching if you're in London before it closes. Given it's an exhibition with free entry, there's nothing to lose, and every chance of walking away with a spot of beauty giving uplift to your day. Not much chance of finding horse tack there, though.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. At the ICA, closes 25th August.

[Image © Lilian Lijn, Sky Never Stops, 1965, Collection V&A Museum]