I'm delighted to announce the publication of _The Debtor in the Convex Mirror_ by Susan Wheeler.
The poem, winner of the sixth annual Boston Review Poetry contest, is an extended engagement with the painting _The Banker and His Wife_ by Quentin Massys (1514). Nimble syntax keeps pace with dynamic language in a considered, compassionate critique of possession and debt in all their multiplicities. A polished mirror with a wide field of view.

An image of the cover and an extract from the poem is available at www.wildhoneypress.com
The book costs Eur 5 / STG 3.50 / USD 5.

The full text is available at the website of Boston Review: 
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/wheeler.html

Since literature is our currency I'm happy to swap for poetry in any form.

best wishes

Randolph Healy
Wild Honey Press

Winner of the Sixth Annual Boston Review Poetry Contest 

Introduced by Richard Howard 


The winning poem of this year's Boston Review poetry contest is an extended dramatic meditation on problems and principles of owing and figuration. We begin (a historically grounded ekphrasis) with an inspection (coached by the famous expert in Flemish art Walter Friedländer) of Quentin Massys's famous 1514 painting of the moneylender and his wife (in the Louvre) which "owes" so much to Leonardo and Van Eyck, and which climaxes a theme much rehearsed in European art of the period. In a sense the poem is an answer to the question of why so many people should have wanted to own a picture of tax men gloating over their imposts-bringing us up to date in New York, by way of a shoplifter's scene ("she watched the cashier in the convex mirror") and a parting glance in the car that takes us away from the museum. There is a whirling sense of the shift from Renaissance Antwerp to modern New York by way of the speaker's response to the painting ("the debtor does not know his debt to the skittering city . . . he crams so much in, Massys . . . Or is it metaphor, what we strive for, we poets"), and an astonishing series of identifications between the figures glimpsed (as in the convex mirror) and imagined as they are reckoned in the ledgers of history. The poem is complex, fruitfully bewildering, but minutely rewarding, beautifully phrased and intimately focused as it is ("my guide in these matters is yourself, / your own soul permeable by beauty, and mine not, not even by the swirling of facts"). It requires rereading, and each time repays with new discoveries, new delights.