Erosion’s Pull.
Granary Books, 2004. Item #GB_122
7 1/2 x 17 in., 28 pp., cloth over boards.
Erosion’s Pull is, upon first glance, possessed of a paradoxically effortless feel. Moving beyond the entrance to the book, a depth and clarity of this project emerges. Maureen Owen and Yvonne Jacquette have created a work of confident lyricism, sophisticated perception, dazzling simplicity, and childlike wonder. The “pull” is felt viscerally in both the drawings and the poems; a tension between weight and buoyancy infuses the work. The swiftness of it—Jacquette’s aerial drawings of landscape hover over earth, Owen’s delicate poems traveling lightly across the page—generates that sense of lift. Yet, the aerial drawings are of sturdy stuff: mountainsides, ice floes, deep ravines. In tandem, the poems plumb gravity while contemplating the seriousness of daily existence. Owen concludes Erosion’s Pull with a series of poems which take cues from reportage in the New York Times. While the poems rotate around thorny subjects, they are also comic, ordinary, and heroic. The images are twinned to this unpretentious sensibility facilitating a mutually sensitive marriage of image and verse.
The five prints in Erosion’s Pull were made from Yvonne Jacquette’s original pastel drawings. The prints were executed by Tim Evans at ImageKing in New York on Hahnemühle Structure paper using an Epson 9500 printer. Katherine Kuehn designed the book and printed the poems in letterpress on a Vandercook SP 15 using Erhardt types and Hahnemühle Ingres papers. Judith Ivry bound the books in New York City during the spring of 2004. This is from an edition of 41 copies, of which 25 are hors commerce and 16 are for sale; each signed by the poet and artist. Out-of-print. As new.
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ABOUT MAUREEN OWEN
ABOUT YVONNE JACQUETTE
Pictured: cover and four page spreads.
Price: $2,500.00