The Eye Reviews
James Wilkes, Weather A System (London: Penned in the Margins, 2009), 77pp.
The pieces in this book work sur le motif, ending with bits of a transcript from a day spent wandering around London in search of fountains. The problem can happily be one of pictorial and perceptual modes of writing intercalating into each other; the ground through which language can strike was never so suave and civic. The Eye saw this book lying on a shelf and immediately hoped that the poem essay had re-arrived, that poise would not be without purpose once more. At certain points - as in the central 'Review Poems' - the problem of being on the spot is staged for our entertainment, these pieces being reviews of imaginary books, before us but inaccessible - half the fun of Weather A System is to watch the inter-operative factors of Wilkes' art begin to sag under the wit of incoherence. Of fun's other half we will not speak.
- The Eye
[#] Previous notes from The Eye
The pieces in this book work sur le motif, ending with bits of a transcript from a day spent wandering around London in search of fountains. The problem can happily be one of pictorial and perceptual modes of writing intercalating into each other; the ground through which language can strike was never so suave and civic. The Eye saw this book lying on a shelf and immediately hoped that the poem essay had re-arrived, that poise would not be without purpose once more. At certain points - as in the central 'Review Poems' - the problem of being on the spot is staged for our entertainment, these pieces being reviews of imaginary books, before us but inaccessible - half the fun of Weather A System is to watch the inter-operative factors of Wilkes' art begin to sag under the wit of incoherence. Of fun's other half we will not speak.
- The Eye
[#] Previous notes from The Eye
