Fugue - Softcover

Ivan Malinowski

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915306565 ISBN 13: 9780915306565

Publisher: Curbstone Pr, 1986

Synopsis

poetry, tr from Danish by Carl King

About this title

Review

Fugue is an elegaic long poem about wind. It lifts, soars, glides and floats, speaking in the personified voice of this endless, gusting current of air. Othertimes, Malinowski slips into the third person and the poem becomes allusive, metaphorical; e.g., ". . the wind rose is a flower/that suspends the perception/of forwards and backwards. . . " or ". .'the summer/is a flowered cushion/ for exiled heads." Throughout this book-length poem a reader will encounter lush and lyrical language and an enormous variety of associations. After all, the wind encounters all things as it spirals the earth. Therein lies Fugue's gorgeous breadth as well as its structural dilemma-the subject can be turned into all things, can be infinite. Wind ascends cosmically, descends to "the wheat in the soil's microsphere," it rustles leaves in the surburbs, joins waterspouts and revolutions with the preaching priest ". . . borne by his gas balloon/ to the seventh heaven." For all the minutiae of detail there is something blousy and flaccid about the conceit that unifies the poem. And yet the book's magnitude and generous spirt is infectious and romantically lovely. Curbstone Press, admirably, has striven to fashion a unified book to better contain Malinowski's sprawling subject-the book is rich with interesting illustrations depicting a wide variety of mythic, symbolic, and representational forms; the offset text is in the author's handwriting; the format is only slightly larger than most small press publications and the extra dimensions help the reader absorb the array of imagery created by this multiplicity of design elements. There are quotes, notes, cosmologies, charts, and grids. While one can sense the preparation the publisher gave Fugue, it's not a satisfying whole: the facsimile handwriting is occasionally unclear, the illustrations not infrequently distract from the text, and the spine of my review copy was poorly glued. Given the nature of this translation and the collaborative complexities of the production, a case might well have been made for it being produced as a quality, illustrated edition or artist's book. -- From Independent Publisher

About this edition

• Publisher: Curbstone Pr
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0915306565
• ISBN 13: 9780915306565
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 72