Campeche

by Joshua Edwards, Van Edwards (Photographer)

Poetry. Photography. Titled after pirate Jean Lafitte's name for Galveston Island, CAMPECHE is a cautionary lyric composed of poems and photographs in which a real place is overlaid with the parable of a mythical world on the verge of an apocalyptic flood. Like the body fishermen of the Yellow River, this book combs water for remains and meditates on evidence, while attempting to reckon with the self as a troubled song within a greater song. "If the soul is a souvenir in human shape, / the sun is half its shadow and discloses / who is what when in public." This is the first book of Joshua Edwards's eschatological trilogy.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

Reviews

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part Ars Memoria, part semiotic inscription on the trunk of a now-virtual, ecocatastropic tree ("Now the horizon/ destroys itself as I replicate a fist again and/ again and again in the palm of my hand"), the speaker of Campeche both rejects and is vexed by lyrical recursivity (shadow boxing with or forced to project an imagined other, in a space devoid of futurity). From "Exterior": "All streets lead to this one,/ where everybody wants to be or least/ wants to have been . . . " Campeche solves the problematic endemic to painting(how to establish an antimony b/w figure and ground when both the subject and depth perception have disappeared?) by reclaiming the poetic vocation of archivist (counting, not capital accumulation, but unmarked time). From "Vanishing Island": "When I was innocent, I climbed those trees . . . where I'd count the masts of ships./ I kept meticulous records of this/ Count, along with a list of animals . . . " Before we name, in the poetic Bestiary of our times (of which Campeche is both blueprint and guide) -- we must return to taxonomy, and meter: how many are we, whence do we hail (species, genus, type), and is self-differentiation, within this vertiginous maze (Campeche beautifully evokes a neo-Renaissance triptych of science, music, and math), the visual art equivalent of a horizon point (the beginning of signification, and point of no return)?

"Like an atlas, I am speech that is not my own.
I know a place beyond style.
Let us call it the self."

[Emilio G · Rating 5 out of 5]

campeche show