‘Collected diggings stretch out in drops, tense / With tied-in bounce.’
In ancient times the word ‘ekphrasis’ meant the oratory of vivid description, a style of speaking that addresses itself to the listener’s imagination. Over many centuries the term acquired a narrower focus: ‘the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art’, runs one influential modern definition. Famous instances of such depictions in poetry are Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad, John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn and W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts. Pursuing classical threads through four major works by Richard Serra that were shown at Gagosian Gallery in London in 2008, Paul Williamson’s Ekphrasis sets itself the ambitious task of using blank verse to create a vividly poetic and thought-provoking addition to a literary tradition that is at least three thousand years old.
Paperback with flaps, 270 x 210 mm, 72 pages, 18 tritone illustrations.
With an introduction by Simone Kotva.
Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov.
June 2014.
ISBN: 9780992891206