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the clarity of distant things

Jane Duran

Cover of the clarity of distant things by Jane Duran
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, American, Caribbean, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (104 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2021)
9781800171596
£11.99 £10.79
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Sep 2021)
9781800171602
£9.59 £8.63
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Jane Duran's new book of two striking sequences takes readers into other worlds – 'gridlines', in which the life and paintings of Agnes Martin are interwoven, and 'miniatures of al-Andalus' inspired by the illuminated Cantigas de Santa María and the art and artefacts of Islamic Iberia.

    The simple gridlines of Duran's couplets recall Martin's square canvasses, her precisely rendered grids and luminous stripes. Responding to individual images and to Martin's own biography, discovering lovely breaths of life entering the 'grey rectangles', the poems' intricate interlockings and brilliant images seem almost to escape the poems' formal enclosures, so that Martin's 'The Peach 1964', 'gave me back // only beige, graphite, / ink, sanity // and orchard after orchard'.
    Jane Duran was born in Cuba and raised in the USA and Chile. Selections of her poems have appeared in Poetry Introduction 8 (Faber 1993), Making for Planet Alice (Bloodaxe 1997), and Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe 2005). In 1995 Enitharmon published her first full collection, Breathe Now, Breathe which won the ... read more
    'Luminous, pared-back work'

    Sarah Westcott, Artemis Poetry

    'This is a superb collection of poems that can only enhance Jane Duran's stature as a poet.'

    Kathleen McPhilemy, Acumen

    'These are quiet poems of intense visual concentration that attempt to access the paintings' deepest recesses... the book's two projects are both focused on frontiers of the visible, literal and figurative horizons... The unifying force in this book is Duran's own experience of the objects of her study, both of which she sees as leaving lasting marks on the world.'

    Ryo Yamaguchi, Harriet Books at The Poetry Foundation

    'Full of beauty and perception, these unusually supple responses seem to reach, in their open-endedness, for the infinite. Jane Duran shows a deep knowledge and engagement with the terrain in both complementary sequences. These are exquisite poems: 'Each one, clarified / true in miniature'.'

    Moniza Alvi

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