The Eye Like a Strange Balloon: Poems

Description

The ever-adventurous author of Louise in Love looks to the visual arts for inspiration with this astonishing fourth collection. The poems in The Eye Like a Strange Balloon find their seed in paintings, film, video, photographs, and collage, and the end results are something more than a sum of their parts. Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backward in time to 1 B.C., where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art's strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating-a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang's sly and elegant commentary on poetry's enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time, and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.

"In these wonderfully energetic and inventive poems, Mary Jo Bang re-envisions ekphrasis. Based on works by artists as diverse as Margaret Bourke-White, Sigmar Polke, Willem de Kooning, and Damien Hirst, her representations of representations implicitly ask just where the 'real' world is--is it not 'really' the marvelous worlds we construct from any raw material available? In short, she posits representations as every bit as real as what they represent, and allows the layers to build up into zones of intensity and ambiguity that leave the reader with a sense of vigorous promise and endless possibility."