Pictures after Poussin, illus. Allen Fisher. Hereford: Spanner Press, 2003.
I am impressed and held by the flawless music, which keeps together all these poems, whose frames, call them, contain and continue the specific story with such singular clarity.I love they way they are able to more from formal to intimate and back again, such a shifting of verbal frame and perspective, a very deft and effective rhetoric altogether.Put simply, here is a story of great complexity told with remarkable directness”as if one were being led through a series of rooms having various character and appointment, but all of one defining whole(for which one can read home.).Wonderful!
Robert Creeley
This was the second time Allen Fisher and I presented our work together. I think these pictures by Allen are outstanding by any standard. There are twenty-three altogether, only eight of which are reproduced in this volume.The full set can be seen athttp://web.me.com/allenfisher1/allen_fisher_iSite/Scattered_Studies.html
One of the pictures was taken for one of phantasm CDs: Four Temperaments: Byrd, Ferrabosco, Parsons & Tallis (AV2054)2004.
This sequence of poems, certainly my most ambitious, are meditations on the world of Poussin inspired by the Poussin exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1995.The poems both refer and do not refer to the paintings themselves. I was aiming for a sense of what it feels like to think about Poussin’s world in relation to our own moment.
I reproduce here just one of the twenty-six poems.
XXVÂ The Earthly Paradise
They had waited in quiet sleep until the torch of the sun brought back
radiance to the sky.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura:Bk V 975
was it half confidence that marked her gesture to the fruit?
eyes turning
a hand to his eyes
atoms dance with utopia of two
her hand on his arm and his on her thigh
struck out from morals and the law
or broken
from an intaglio of that Paradise which is between
there and nothingness
they are suspended in an absolution
of the question of where they would go next
it was not prudent to have placed them so
he should have built towards a desire of future haste
and lands
or filled the space with children and animals
against the silence of the loneliness of two
here elsewhere was not recognizably sublime
though they felt large and dark inside it
when love is complete
the ordinary sun casts a shadow of that green in which
the dark heart dances
a room of leaves rests between the split rock and the
dark pool
it is large and warm and full
its walls are made of shadows
the bed is of shadows
the rock is of shadows
and the split in the rock is of shadows
and all night we have loved in the green shadows
and our love is a love of shadows
so that the world climbs so high before us
that no movement enters us in that darkest green
which runs from the eye….
Copies of this book are available from the author or from Allen Fisher.