Description
Book SynopsisPoets have long been drawn to the images and techniques of still life. Artists and poets alike present intimate worlds where time is suspended in the play of form and color and where history disappears amid everyday things. The genre of still life...
Trade ReviewBonnie Costello argues for still life as a mode of juxtaposition that can hold contrary ideas at a standstill without merging or synthesizing them. Far from being a minor genre, still life becomes, for the author, the aesthetic end of the more politicized modernism of the 1930s (a point that is qualitatively different from the argument that still life was deliberately aesthetic). In Costello's modeling, still life is not restricted to its material components but can include radio waves, foreign news, technology, cinema, even the artist's vocation.... She concentrates on one visual artist, Joseph Cornell, juxtaposing him to canonical American poets Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and the academically undertreated Richard Wilbur. In so doing, she virtually wipes out the past generation's distinction between the subjective Stevens and the quasi-objective Williams—a fruitful side effect of her inventive exploration of intermedial crossings.
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