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National Gallery

National Gallery

By Jonathan Ball
Categories: Poetry
Paperback : 9781552453971, 128 pages, September 2019
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781770566163, 128 pages, September 2019
Ebook (PDF) : 9781770566170, 112 pages, September 2019

A poetic collage of art in the modern world: from Rilkean elegies for an iPhone to a meditation on Melville's classic
Jonathan Ball's fourth poetry book, the first in seven years, swirls chaos and confession together. At the book's heart is a question: Why create art? A series of poetic sequences torment themselves over this question, offering few answers and taking fewer prisoners. Loose sonnets that consider the artistic creations of Leatherface, monster-killer from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, sit alongside Rilkean elegies for an iPhone. Surreal meditations on the collage work of Guy Maddin are followed by all of the lines from Melville's Moby-Dick that mention "salt." Politicians and painters jostle while absurdist humour crashes into stark admissions of vulnerability in the wake of having children. A startling diversity of styles and subjects feed into the maelstrom of The National Gallery, and its dark currents will draw you in to drown.