Distance Measured in Days - Softcover

Anthony Howell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903006198 ISBN 13: 9781903006191

Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House, 2021

Synopsis

A poet and his wife experiment with love and life in the early seventies. They explore the Middle-East and entertain their intellectual friends in a house decorated with kelims. Tragedy knocks this life out of kilter. Their daughter dies of cot-death just as their relationship is at its most fragile. The world splinters into a frightening kaleidoscope of images from the past and from the present. While attempts are made to reconcile the harshness of their loss with some strategy of togetherness for the future, this bitter, poignant text offers no mystical or sentimental resolution of the dissonance of emotional pain. The author shows how grief can produce a distancing effect, a sensation of being an outsider at one's own ceremonies of mourning. A numbing of the senses insulates the poet from breakdown, but it also conducts him into brutish action. Here the loss of a child is seen from a male point-of-view. The Distance Measured in Days employs innovative techniques to duplicate with force the emotional state of bereavement. The result sets forth the condition which grief may entail with no redemption posited beyond the integrity of its portrayal.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony Howell was the founder and director of The Theatre of Mistakes - a performance company of the seventies noted for its work in galleries as well as in theatres - and is the co-author of Elements of Performance Art, the first compendium of performance exercise. He has performed at the Tate Gallery (London), at the Paula Cooper Gallery (New York) and at the Paris and Sydney Biennales, as well as at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre (London), the Theatre for the New City (New York) and the Théâtre Dejazet (Paris). Recently he created "Commentary on Klein" for London's Hayward Gallery. A Senior Lecturer in art and performance, he is the editor of Grey Suit: Video for Art and Literature, and for several years he has organised the performance festival "Cardiff Art in Time". He has also published a novel and seven books of poetry, and has lectured and performed at theatre festivals, at universities and at art galleries in Denmark, Serbia and Macedonia. He recently directed The Infernal Triangle at the ICA, London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1903006198
• ISBN 13: 9781903006191
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250