Autumn News

Deerbrook Editions has a new web site. you can buy books there now, and leave donations. It is a new format with a similar look to the old site, and will be upgraded periodically with new features. I have to spend some time attending to promoting and getting reviews for our new book Brushstrokes and glances by Djelloul Marbrook, the prize winning author. The title of this post links to our new site with most of the information about the book and author, with new things happening everyday, there will be more to come, if I can keep up with it all. Further down is the foreword to the book.

Two new poetry collections are in the works. One, Brushstrokes and glances by Djelloul Marbrook, is already in print and headed for market. The author is an exceptional writer from Germantown, NY, and has gotten attention for his first prize winning book, Far from Algiers.

More for Djelloul Marbrook.

“Djelloul Marbrook sounds like no one else.”
—Barbara Louise Ungar, Celaan

Djelloul Marbrook - poems and interview on From the Fishouse.

I know that Djelloul Marbrook is an exceptional writer, as anyone can see that visits his blog and web site. I cannot say anything better about the book than does Lucy Bowditch, author of the foreword to Brushstrokes and glances, which I will post here:

Djelloul Marbrook’s poems unflinchingly celebrate and chide. With his literary brushstrokes and glances, he insightfully considers artists, critics, curators, viewers, and the works themselves. Unlike the art historian who might analyze, dissect, and uncover meaning by deploying a legalistic claim, the poet surrenders to direct feeling uncovering experiential truths that parallel the truth of art itself. As Horace reminds us, ut pictura poesis.

The poems are kaleidoscopic: the narrator’s position constantly shifts, as does the time period considered. Sometimes we are looking at a painter’s process. Another moment, we are situated within a painting itself, a detail of the composition. Next, the style or the artist’s biography becomes a metaphor for a human condition or desire.

In Lucian Freud and my mother, Marbrook captures the opportunistic, ruthless quality of that particular bird of prey—the painter—for whom all is fair game. By contrast, Georges Seurat (Studies for A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte) is a gentle appreciation the artist’s fleeting Symbolist preparatory drawings for the large signature pointillist work now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Undersides of leaves, a poem evoking the late, photography-inspired work of Corot, describes the shimmering halation of moving leaves from the perspective of one of the leaves integrated in Corot’s largely monochromatic composition. In Shabtis (The Brooklyn Museum), Marbrook playfully identifies with an ancient Egyptian burial figurine that performs chores in the afterlife for Queen Nefertiti and escapes the burden of quotidian temporal existence.

Praise, admonishment, and acceptance inform Marbrook’s agile narrative voice. Making an unexpected analogy between an ineffectual government and Caravaggio’s force of character, Marbrook champions the artist in A government like Caravaggio. At times a poem takes on a reprimanding tone as in The critic speaks, which could refer to the poet’s view of the critic or the critic’s view of the world. A pale of words, a sweet description of a sixth century BCE grave stele representing a little girl and her youthful departed older brother, sadly reflects art’s limited but significant ability to withstand profound human loss.

Djelloul Marbrook’s poems unexpectedly animate the visual arts due to the multiple fanciful perspectives and succinct identifications of art- related realities. In My mother dying, Marbrook, at high personal cost no doubt, recognizes the desire of an artist to, on one hand, remain childlike and thus have access to all that primary process material, and, on the other, marshal skills to transform experience into art allowing one to live for a thousand years. After all, life is short. Art is long.

Brushstrokes and Glances is as well a welcome companion to anyone interested in poetry and its role as a sister art to a broad history of visual art. Marbrook ranges from contemporary artists to anonymous ancient Egyptian sculptors. His vision invokes the delight of promiscuous wandering in New York’s best museums, the Metropolitan, the Frick or the Brooklyn Museum. Nothing remains static in this merry-go-round of the senses where, “The eye is best that distrusts the mind.”

Lucy L. Bowditch
Associate Professor of Art History
The College of Saint Rose