The Eye Like a Strange Balloon: Poems (Grover Press Poetry) - Softcover

Bang, Mary Jo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802141579 ISBN 13: 9780802141576

Publisher: Grove Press, 2004

Synopsis

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 backwards in time to 1 BC, 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.

About this title

Review

"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."

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802141579
• ISBN 13: 9780802141576
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112