Joan Siegel has poems in Raritan

Two new poems by Joan Siegel appear in Raritan. I was very pleased to find a copy of Raritan in my PO Box with two of Joan's fine poems in the back.

You can buy her book Hyacinth for the Soul from Deerbrook Editions web site now using a secure PayPal shopping cart and you don't need a PayPal account to do so. Just go to the catalog link on our web site and help to support our authors. Joan's book is a full collection of excellent poems.

demonstration on the iron hand press

Here is a home-style movie of the basic operation of the Washington style handpress, the R.Hoe & Company platen press, the Press at Deerbrook.






I know the lighting is terrible, but here is another view of the inking to proof a test run of a cut from the operators side. Showing here the basic operation of the printing press much as it was done for centuries on this type of press or the common press of colonial times since the development of movable type by Gutenberg. The steps are here done by one person, what normally would have been done by two, one person inking and one pulling, the basics are the same and by experienced workers in colonial times could yield up to 200 impressions an hour.

Of course inking methods were different before the development of rollers in the nineteenth century. The inking was done with "balls", leather covered padding attached to wood handles. A pair of these round hand-held pads were rolled in a twisting motion on the ink stone and then over the form of type. It required skill and sensitivity of a similar nature as using the roller.

This is the basic principle of "relief" printing or "letterpress". A form is "locked up" on the bed of the press, the "tympan and frisket" carries the paper while the entire form is moved under the platen and the bar is pulled lowering the platen, pressing the paper onto the form. Usually the paper used in this operation was a dampened handmade paper. Most incunabula of rare libraries and fine press books were printed in this manner.









The common press as shown in Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing a Dover reprint of the 1684 edition. Note the inking "balls" or brayers hanging on the left side of the press with their mull or pestle shaped handles.

Listen to Djelloul read

This video is courtesy of Brent Robison and Djelloul Marbrook. Well done and a pleasure to hear the voice of the poet reading from his new book Brushstrokes and glance.

Djelloul Marbrook's new book Brushstrokes and glances is on the Valparaiso Poetry Review list of Recommended Books: volume 12.

They are looking for reviewers.

Here is one of my favorites.



Review: Djelloul Marbrook’s Brushstrokes and glances

Teresa Giordano
December 8, 2010


I envy Djelloul Marbrook and I am grateful to him. I envy his ability to inhabit a painting, to leave a dark state of mind and enter a world that transcends our own sometimes frightening often banal world. I’m grateful that his talent and grace grant me access to that world through his book of poems Brushstrokes and glances. Art for Mr. Marbrook – particularly painting – is not merely a collection of objects to be admired. Art is a place that beckons; paintings are to be visited – as alive and dimensional as a mountaintop, a city street, or church or temple. As in those places we can order our lives in front of a great work, find meaning in brushstrokes. As he says in Picasso’s bull: We need a museum to show us/we can unbind our captive lives. Djelloul Marbrook’s triumph is not only that he can experience art the way most of us cannot it is also that he can articulate his vision and share it in this beautifully crafted book of poems. Brushstrokes and glances is an invitation to “lift the curse of containment” (see A naming spree). It is an invitation well worth accepting.

Thanksgiving, not just another

When holidays begin to look like commercial endgames, and the spirit of the season seems to lack best wishes, what can we do?

I usually pick up a book, either to read or draw in; or I return to the studio to get away from the glitz, in an attempt to return to my creative center and memories of times gone by when the spirit was with me and I shared with friends and lovers. Making things was and is one way to find spirit in the approaching image of dark December. I hope I can find time to continue being thankful, as is the spirit of Thanksgiving, and to make something like cards and ornaments.

This Thanksgiving, I found hope in a review of our recent title, Brushstrokes and glances, reviewed by Tom Holmes on The Line Break / redaction. He was nice enough to post a favorable look into the poems as well as the design of the book, which, in all, gave me something of a small reverie. In the true sense of Thanksgiving, when we are filled not only physically with celebratory cuisine, but also a sense of being part of the Earth and the seasons, our giving to others, as our giving thanks, can bring us hope. Some say that hope is over rated, but sometimes it seems as if we get what we believe.

So I am grateful for this review and the sense of renewed spirit that it brings.

Paul Elisha (right) interviews Djelloul Marbrook about Brushstrokes and glances, his second book of poems, for Bard's Eye View, a series originating at WAMC, Albany, for Northeastern Public Radio. The interview will be aired later this winter. The book will be published by Deerbrook Editions in December.

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

Praise for Dawn Potter

There is a new look to deerbrookeditions.blogspot.com as well as deerbrookeditions.com. If only I could figure out which merchant system by which to offer sales on line. I found one, MerchantWarehouse.com, that proudly flaunts its ratings, but the best thing might be to move to a new host that can offer the package deal with a comparable merchant account.

To all visitors, Dawn Potter's new book of poems How the Crimes Happened from CavanKerry Press is a remarkably good book, and you must read it, you won't be sorry. This book is moving and full of engaging poems, fresh language, and skillful images that build glimpses of the world almost cinematic in color.

The title link to this post takes you to Dawn's blog.

You may know that Deerbrook Editions published Dawn's first book Boy Land & Other Poems, in 2004, one of the first manuscripts to appear in my P.O. Box. Boy Land, which I suggested we make Boy Land & Other Poems, and Dawn agreed only with slight reluctance, was interesting and well crafted. How the Crimes Happened exhibits even more skill, nuance, and language, that carries the reader on a true symphony. I recommend this book, as on the cover Ellen Dudley puts it, "Fearless . . . these poems sing service to love, loss, pity, and hope. . . . her (poet's) authority clear."