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Sample pages...
This limited edition grew out of a collaboration between artist and poet, words and images
spawning one another as the book developed
into a suite of nine poems in which natural
and mythic patterns form and dissolve
as time and light play over them.
In the poems by MacArthur Award-winning poet Eleanor Wilner, various gods of Greek mythology appear in end-of-the-twentieth-century guises, fade back into memory, and are reabsorbed into the elements or forces that first called them forth. All of the poems, with one exception, were written for this book, and are previously uncollected.
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The mythic world of the text is reflected in the accompanying lithographs. Photographic images of water, wood, trees, grasses and stars create shifting visual textures as they float from edge to edge of the verso of each double-page spread, and continue onto the recto page where they fade away to accommodate the letterpress-printed poetry. Intense tones of blacks, blues, ochres, purples and grays enhance the resonance of the images, linking them closely to the authoritative voice of the poems.
Each 13 1/2 x 20 inch page opening presents a single poem. Two longer poems are set on fold-out pages. The type, 14 point Monotype Garamond, was cast at the Press and Letterfoundry of Michael and Winifred Bixler in Skaneateles, New York, and printed by Daniel Keleher at Wild Carrot Letterpress, Hadley, Massachusetts. The lithographs were hand pulled by Timothy P. Sheesley at Corridor Press, Otego, New York.
The paper is Arches Velin. The book is bound in midnight blue Japanese fabric, and the title is stamped in silver onto irridescent blue paper labels. Lithographs of star fields line the inside covers, and are printed on the flyleaves. Sarah Creighton, of Easthampton, Massachusetts, executed the hand binding. Limited to forty-five numbered copies, signed by the poet and artist. 1998. Out of Print.
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