Description
Book SynopsisJane Duran's new book of two striking sequences takes readers into other worlds – 'gridlines', in which the life and paintings of Agnes Martin are interwoven, and 'miniatures of al-Andalus' inspired by the illuminated Cantigas de Santa María and the art and artefacts of Islamic Iberia. The simple gridlines of Duran's couplets recall Martin's square canvasses, her precisely rendered grids and luminous stripes. Responding to individual images and to Martin's own biography, discovering lovely breaths of life entering the 'grey rectangles', the poems' intricate interlockings and brilliant images seem almost to escape the poems' formal enclosures, so that Martin's 'The Peach 1964', 'gave me back // only beige, graphite, / ink, sanity // and orchard after orchard'.
Trade Review'Duran twists her hybrid colours into rich, sensual, and perfectly controlled statements of memory and loss... A poet to rejoice in.' - The Observer; 'Full of beauty and perception, these unusually supple responses seem to reach, in their open-endedness, for the infinite. Jane Duran shows a deep knowledge and engagement with the terrain in both complementary sequences. These are exquisite poems: 'Each one, clarified / true in miniature'.' - Moniza Alvi
