Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The second statement is helpful though only in so far as it is clear what a painting does better than a poem (and vice versa) and poems about paintings are always partly about discovering what that is. The poem may attempt to reproduce the supposed advantage of the rival art in its own medium which is of course to deny or steal that avowed capacity – however it is defined. And while any reader might be impatient with the idea that a poem could be a better picture than a painting since this would be possible only if we take ‘picture’ as a metaphor in variously complex ways poems about paintings are testing the strength of that metaphor. Is ‘picture’ itself in fact ever anything other than a figure? In a literal sense the impossibility of ekphrasis – the doom of an ultimate and inevitable failure the absurdity or unnaturalness in writing a poem for a painting – seems obvious to all those who approach the task and yet this understanding has not acted as a deterrent at all. Critical writing everywhere also sounds the warning: how can poetry hope to represent describe or reproduce painting? How can literary language find a parallel or an analogy with art? How could we conceive of a poet being successful in his or her attempt to write about a visual representation? ‘The relation of language to painting is an infinite relation’ writes Michel Foucault. (LL)