Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Saturday 21 January 2017

"Henri, Sophie and the hieratic head of Ezra Pound" by Tom Holmes (BlazeVox, 2009)

Recounting Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's thoughts about making the sculpture of Pound, plus some views from Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Sophie Brzeska (before and after Henri's death). Raw material comes from letters and memoirs. Many of the poems have been previously published (in Mississippi Review, The American Poetry Journal, etc)

I suspect I would have preferred extracts from the source material to these poems (some of which read like found poems anyway). There might be enough material here for a short pamphlet but not a book. I liked "What Ford Maddox Hueffer Hid in the Garden" and a few lines from other poems - e.g.

"I carve out tomorrow's shadows" (p.17). "Sophie loves like she walks in the rain - / she shudders at impending thunder/ and trembles under open umbrellas" (p.27), "they are the brutalities all art must meet/ before becoming human, before Vorticism" (p.56), "you've a fear of death/ and of living./ You must choose" (p.74).

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for spending time with the book. I appreciate it. I'm glad you think there are found poems in here, which means I succeeded in imaginatively embracing the characters' minds and environment. In other words, there are no found poems in this collection. Thanks again for reading :)

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