Illuminated Verses by George Elliott Clarke
My rating: 3/5 cats
if you like poetry, but feel it should have more full-frontal nudity to really make it special, this may be the book for you!
i do truly love george elliott clarke, but it’s just distracting having his poems offset by naked ladies cavorting by the seaside. and i wanted to read it today while waiting in the longest post office line ever, but i felt awkward about it, because all the little old ladies were already glaring at me even though i held the door for them.
the book is only okay. it’s a bunch of clarke’s sexier poems, but i’d rather have more poems and fewer photographs, because it’s already a slender volume, and they just take up space. and i’m not a prude, i like boobies just as much as anyone else, but these particular photographs, for me, are not particularly powerful/sexy/interesting. many are oddly lit, or out of focus or just silly (naked woman lolling in a leaf pile just makes me concerned for moist sluggy things and beetle things invading her…privacy) the blues & jazz sequence is very good – hell, most of it is very good, he’s something of a hero to me. it just seemed to me that i started reading it, and before i knew it, it was over.
and here i am, reading it for the articles… sucker.
