The Daily Glance
nick-e melville's selections and dissections is a vispo book that harkens back to the concrete poetry traditions of the twentieth-century. I can easily see easily see Apollinaire's "Il Pleut" in melville's section on rain, and much of the work reminds me of the great concrete poetry of Brazil fifty or sixty years ago. The pieces are updated to deal with contemporary ideas, and ultimately, this book concerns how we know things through language and how language mirrors visually our world while at the same time shows itself as not being able to fully complete the task.
My favorite section focuses on the spaces between letters. melville turns the typical black of letters into white and turns the white space black, so on the white paper we cannot always see the letters, but we see the spaces between the letters as forms themselves. The forms are not always familiar, so melville is taking something that we look at everyday and showing us how we are not aware of all that rests before us.
Comments