Report from Australia – Maureen Alsop
Maureen Alsop sent two books from Australia for the collection, one is a book of poetry entitled Pyre (What Books Press) and a signed, limited edition (of 100 copies) print collection – a companion based on poems from Pyre. The images are close ups of drawings created through a meditative process including asemic writing and entopic graphomania – a surrealist technique of automatic drawing in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots. The present images are from this collection.
In our email correspondence I sent Maureen a collage poem that I constructed with snippets of lines from her book…
Pyre to Guide the Dead for Maureen
If you are to guide the dead
between constellations innumerable
crouch in the sand,
a black stone on the tongue.
What was left to tell?
Before death, the moment shimmers.
Fireflies alight.
Dreams are supplications
we hide between
carved from instinct.
The night,
an imagined stillness
quiet as a page,
offered safe passage
across an uncertain sea.
One sentence left on the page
appeared below language
clings to the wind
tangled in smoke
as in mourning.
The living move through us,
A part of you follows
but let’s forget that trouble
so we might forgive.
Addition by subtraction.
Horizon arrived.
The gates closed.
