Anyone who has flipped through a storybook knows that illustrations can make a good book even better. In the following collections, writers use art to inspire and support their work. The husband-wife collaboration Figures and Figurations succeeds beautifully, but the modern art selected for This Is Not It does little to enhance the difficult stories.
Figures and Figurations is a slim volume that represents 30 years of creative couplehood. Octavio Paz, Mexico’s most famous modern poet and Nobel Prize winner, wrote lyrical responses to collages created by his wife, Maria José Paz. His wife, in turn, made two new collages to correspond to poems he had published earlier. Octavio’s poems are simple and beautiful, often addressing themes of nostalgia and nature. At times they feel stretched to fit the corresponding collage, but usually images from the collage blend well with the form and significance of the writing. English translations by Eliot Weinberger appear next to the collages, but the original Spanish poems are included at the end, a beautiful gesture that allows readers to admire rhyme and alliteration that is lost in translation.
The poem that matches the cover collage is called ‘The Dream of Pens:’
The blue hand has become a sketch pen Above, Mt. Fuji is born, dressed in white. Slope of tall grasses: three pines and a ghost. Some swallows ask for the moon. Below, on a bed of worn velvet, steel pens sleep. They are seeds that dream of their resurrection: tomorrow they will be fountains.
Marie José’s collages are wonderful, but they feel constrained and flat as two-dimensional pictures in a book. Readers will want to see them in person, andwhen the curator isn’t lookingto reach out and touch them. Octavio wrote an afterword to the collection that illuminates how Marie José created her strange, whimsical, shadow-box collages. She collected tiny bits of trash, lost buttons, scraps of paper, metal, wood and trinkets, which Octavio calls ‘the treasures and detritus that the wave of time abandons… the whitecaps of the hours.’
Octavio’s tender essay is followed by a second afterword by Yves Bonnefoy, a well-known French poet and critic. The abstract, long-winded diatribe on the creative process is the only weak moment of this collection. Bonnefoy and the translator, Esther Allen, lose the reader with phrases such as ‘questioning the orthodoxies of the intellect and morality.’
Marie José created images that are simple enough to be understood and clever enough to be ingenious, without being self-consciously meaningful or pretentious. The same cannot be said for Bonnefoy’s afterword, which unfortunately complicates an otherwise lovely and precise collection of poems and images.
This is Not It is a collection of experimental, postmodern stories. Packaged as a graphic designer’s dream, each story has its own cover page with a corresponding piece of contemporary art. It is unclear whether Lynne Tillman chose the art to match the tale, or if the tale was written to match the art – the first of many ambiguities in this collection. Elusive and sterile modern art, such as drawings of little sperm or a picture of an empty glass, do little to illuminate Tillman’s baffling prose.
Tillman’s characters are New York bohemians tortured by artistic urgesspecifically female writers struggling to express their bleak perspectives. The stories are full of interior monologues, psychological dream interpretation and writers writing about writing. Some of the experimental forms are interesting, like the story ‘To Find Words,’ in which the narrator is the woman’s lost ‘voice.’ The woman has laryngitis, literally, which translates into her inability to write a convincing text.
Tillman is well-published and fairly well-respected, but the content of this project doesn’t live up to its packaging. The few exceptions include ‘Hold Me,’ a delicate and focused series of snapshots dealing with people who long for human connections. ‘TV Tales’ also has rare emotional weight, but is ultimately unfulfilling because it only relays news briefs of people acting in desperation. It is clear that Tillman is trying to be profound, but her writing feels awkward, self-absorbed, indifferent and lost.