Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 3, #23]
Brett Foster Reviews a New Book
of Illustrations for THE DIVINE COMEDY
For BOOKS AND CULTURE
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/june/foster060810.html
This thin, handsome collection, featuring Michael Mazur’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, alongside Robert Pinsky’s translated passages on facing pages, promises to appeal to various readerships. Those unfamiliar with Dante can gain a terrific first impression of his medieval epic poem and its treatment of the afterlife from these selections (no lengthy text or intimidating notes in sight). On the other hand, longtime lovers of the Commedia will find here cherished lines brought to new life in Pinsky’s renderings, but most refreshing will be the “embedded” perspectives of Mazur’s illustrations. We never see the character Dante or his guide Virgil themselves, as if pilgrims posing on a stage, but experience Mazur’s alluring visions of their supernatural settings as if looking over the characters’ shoulders, or through their own eyes.
As Pinsky recounts in a preface to this volume, Mazur (whom the art world lost recently) had been an avid reader of Dante in Italian for decades, and he supplied monotype images for Pinsky’s popular edition of Inferno in the mid-1990s. Praising Mazur’s images for inspiring and guiding his own translation efforts, Pinsky describes his collaborator’s works as “themselves acts of translation, embodying certain vital principles.” Pinsky explains the suitability of the monotype form for Inferno—not only in its somber, black-and-white effects, but also in how a print is squeezed through the press. The final products, incorporating the “unique, unpredictable results of pressure,” are moving reflections of the pit in Dante’s narrative, its inhabitants enduring the unrelenting pressures of sin.
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Read the full review:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/june/foster060810.html
I’ll Tell What I Saw:
Select Translations and Illustrations from the Divine Comedy.
Michael Mazur
Paperback: Sarabande Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Powells Books Reviews
Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_06_14.html
Sonia Sanchez’s latest book resonates as boldly as a jazz ensemble; clear and poignant, it is intransigent in her subject matter. Her impassioned reflections come in the loose form of the American haiku, in groups of two to twenty-one haiku at a time. Primarily ekphrastic, her poems react to and commend the work and activism of African American singers, artists, authors, sculptors, painters, celebrities, and political and social activists, to whom many of the poems are dedicated. Sanchez presents a deeply personal, affected history and promulgation of her race, yet does so in each poem with a fresh breath and new song.
The collection begins with a preface, a “Haikuography.” Most emphasized is the “haiku nature” that resides beneath our rushing lives, the simplest (and nevertheless complex) essence of our existence. Sanchez proclaims that haiku “offer no solutions”; indeed, there are times when no solutions exist, as in “Sister Haiku (for Pat)”:
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Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_06_14.html
Morning Haiku.
Sonia Sanchez.
Hardback: Beacon Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
