Serendipity

Welcoming us into the afterlife of the happy accident, Carol Mavor’s poetic ruminations reveal a cavalcade of surprising connections between a diverse array of images and objects. In the process, Serendipity reflects on the magical power of writing itself, on the capacity of the learned essayist to take us on dizzying flights of fancy and into profound depths of understanding. * Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford *

Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object is like wind. Rushing, it blows air into crevices and corners, mingling and affecting; rustling. Serendipity, like strong winds, collides objects, found, post-gust, with limbs intermingled, evidence of their play. Mavor’s writing in and through Serendipity is best put, in the book’s “a productive bumping into”.

-- Theodore Anderson * Newcity Lit *

Mavor’s Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object includes collecting among its interests, but Mavor is mainly tuned into our moments of discovery, “by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”, and later, of “finding something that you did not exactly know you were looking for until you found it”. A widely published professor of art history, Mavor experiences serendipitous moments while gazing at artworks and artifacts, and while writing allusive, bounding essays about creative thought. So when she considers Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St Matthew (1602) and the angel hovering over the startled saint who is trying to write something, the angel who passes freely between two worlds, she is also enacting the role of the angel, a liminal “middle voice” between writer and reader, the past and the now.

-- Ron Slate * On the Seawall *