$140 item # 24

                  Turkish Pears in August, Robert Bly, Midnight Paper Sales, 2005.  38 pages. 8 x 6 inches. 150 copies.

From Robert Bly’s introduction:

A few years ago, I began to hear inside the stanza individual sounds such as in or air or ar call out to each other. An er is a sort of being that cries out… Hearing these cries put me into a new country of poetry. I was not hiking among ideas or images or stories, but among tiny, forceful sounds. What would happen if I adopted in or ar as the center of the poem? …Every poem, of course, has to have images and ideas and some sort of troubled speaker. But I began more and more to shift attention to the little mouths that cry out their own name.


The first image I made for this book was of a pear with a droplet of water falling from it. I was anxious to imply “sound” in the images, and I felt the reader could anticipate the sound of the droplet hitting the ground. The more I thought about it, the more pathetic this attempt seemed, when placed beside Bly’s journey into his new country of poetry. Eventually I came to the conclusion that line is to the artist what sound is to the poet, and that the use of vigorous line in the images was enough, as it creates an interesting parallel to the sounds from Bly’s “little mouths”.

20 ramages, along with Bly’s introduction, and three 2-color engravings by myself, were printed on Zerkall mould-made paper. The Italian Old Style type and Monument titling were cast by Scott King and came to this volume in pure and vestal modesty. The cover paper was made for the edition by Bridget O’Malley. It was dyed a deep indigo blue, and contains mica flakes that sparkle like stars. I have added an engraved golden moon to the sky. Issued in a slipcase.