Bomb

A landmark first-time collaboration between poet Clark Coolidge and writer/scholar/artist Keith Waldrop, Bombis a meditation on a book of photographs that documents the Manhattan Project. Coolidge's 30-page poem begins with epigraphs by Democritus, Gregory Corso and Andre Breton with Paul Eluard, and continues in an elliptical, glancing narrative style that lucidly investigates a subject often too traumatic to consider directly: the impact of the atomic bomb on our everday lives. As Coolidge puts it, the general tendency has been to "put the bomb in a glass vase/add dust and forget." Like all of Coolidge's work, Bombis sharp, stark and rhythmic; the poet here tangles with the dreamlike oddness of the photographs at hand in fits and starts of highly textured language. Keith Waldrop's series of collages are literal reworkings of the original pictures: deep blacks and bright whites excavated from the book, remade here in the image of the poem.Faisal Devji is the author of 'Bomb', published 2000 under ISBN 9781887123327 and ISBN 1887123326.