unconcerned
but not indifferent - click here to preview this book Comments: Derek
Adams has made a subtle, reverent and perceptive appreciation of Man
Ray, his work and those he loved, a beguiling reflection of this great
Surrealist's life and those inseparably linked to him. If
Man Ray invented himself much as a novelist creates a fictional character,
then what do we have here? Verse-biography, verse-novel, or Adams' own
self-creation? It's probably a little of all of these, and certainly
results in a book that is uniquely vivid and remarkable. Drawing on
the brilliantly-lit lives of modernism's avant-garde, we are taken on
a truly sur-(above-and-beyond-the)-real exploration, in a sequence of
poems that are ever exact and inventive. In
Derek Adams' work we find the spark between surrealism and biography,
text and pictogram. The author, like his subject, is always ahead of
the game. Whether inventing, researching, or simply searching for, Man
Ray's friends, photographs or geographical haunts, the poems in 'unconcerned...
but not indifferent' [text, punctuation, paper, glue] are flash lit
moments of bright beauty and alarm. Those who pay attention will remember
these words in the dark as the redeye burns.
Reviews: The
poetry-biography of photographer Man Ray by poet/photographer Derek
Adams is a great idea well done and a snip at five quid. The
art-forms and artistic preoccupations of the 1920s hold Derek Adams
in a trance, and through his skilful interweaving of Man Ray's life
and works with poems themselves constructed in terms of shifting focus,
interchangeability of perspective and ever-evolving contrasts we are
led into his fascination with this epoch. For example, the eroticism
of the 1920s, especially in terms of the sexually outrageous, but essentially
sexist images of women, is celebrated in Kiki de Montparnasse. ...part
homage to the man, part thumbnail history of Dada, part study of a life
as a work of art, and the rest is a chronicle of self-obsession. A neat
trick to pull in the space of 23 poems. Contents:
Some of these poems poems were originally published in these magazines Impossibilité dancer/danger 1920, Marcel 1915, Paris 1921 A l'heure de l'observatoire, les Amoureux, 1932 - 34 - Magma
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