I've just been reading, for the first time, Muriel Rukeyser's magnificent
1938 sequence, 'The Book of the Dead'. It stemed from an episode at Gauley
Bridge, West Virginia, where a power company knowingly exposed its miners to
silicosis, solely because of the high profit margins available on silica.
The book mixes documentary evidence and poetic explorations, narrative and
lyric, to call for social justice and, most relevant now, attempt to
encompass the operations of power.
'This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster's
stance with his gun smoking and out is not so
vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.
Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills
narrow to this, clouds over every town
finally indicate the stored destruction.'
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
A Chide's Alphabet
www.chidesplay.8m.com
Painting Without Numbers
www.paintstuff.20m.com/default.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/default.htm
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