Poetry
This is a book about or around or inside owls, some still here, some barely here, some already gone. It’s more than less of a field guide and less than more of an environmental report. As the wonderful poet Will Alexander probably would not say, it’s BA’d to the bone.
George Myers Jr.’s illustrated Worlds End is a magic carpet ride through history that touches down, finally, on your heart. The genre-bending novel is told episodically through an amateur naturalist’s cabinet of curiousities and characters from centuries past, including Mary Shelley, a beekeeper’s wife, a World War I ambulance driver, and a woman with a prehensile ponytail. Myers explores the fragility of nature and history, blending the real and remembered in a haunting meditation on all that slips away.
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Márton Koppány notes in his introduction: “Lately I’ve been playing with putting together pieces from distant periods. Some recurring topics are: question marks, clouds, ellipses. They overlap, but ellipses outnumber everything else. Any triad can be considered an ellipsis, and occasionally different (or seemingly different) numbers like 1, 2 and 4 serve the same idea even better, because they are elliptical only elliptically.” His ellipses take many forms — buttons, stones, letters, fish, et al —though I profess my favorite among his ellipses is actually invisible. Perched at the intersection of the dado rail that runs along two of the walls of the room I am writing this in, there is a signed postcard-sized print of a singular piece of vispo, a lounge chair with only one leg but still remaining perfectly upright. It is called Ellipsis No. 5, & is, coincidentally, the first piece in “peut-être le Messie.” “Perhaps the Messiah” is a wide-ranging title, an ellipsis incorporating the millennia between the canonical gospel of St. Luke & the work of Isidore Isou, a Romanian-born French poet, founder of Lettrisme, author of L’Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie. Márton Koppány’s book is also wide-ranging — perhaps not temporally, but rather attitudinally. I have previously remarked on the “. . . humor, minimalism, satire, genius, art, politics, its multi-faceted et ceteras” of Koppány’s work. This selection of his ellipses evidences every one of those individual characteristics as well as the incredible gestalt when they are combined.
– Mark Young; poet, artist, editor.
