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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 Born
Again 1905, Armoury Show 1913, Kiki 1921,
Entr’acte 1924, A l'heure de l'observatoire, les Amoureux, 1932 - 34 - Magma
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