Pier 52
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:30th Jul '26
Should be back in stock very soon
Jane Duran’s Pier 52 is a poetic diptych. Its first part is a meditation on the architectural sculptures and installations of artist Gordon Matta-Clark, whose radical cuts in derelict, abandoned buildings brought revelatory light, movement, space and distance into confinement and darkness. In a second sequence, ‘closed spaces, Palestine’, Duran evokes the enclosures imposed by Israel on Palestinians. Here is a brave new world of barriers, surveillance and unimaginable loss, where both the entrances and exits are blocked – ‘No shade here, no way through’.
'Reading this collection is to resensitise our senses of vision and poise. Duran is a guide with the gift of communicating wonder as well as contemplation, starting us off with meditations on the eery spaces - and almost euphoric beams of light - created by much-missed artist Matta-Clark. As the poems proceed so the reader walks from wharf to city block and out and up to trees (where their metaphoric dance is matched by actual contemporary dance). Gradually piers and bridges, the means of connecting us all, give way to something much more sinister: the Israeli walls put up in Palestine. Even here Duran finds joy, moving from the thought-provoking conceptual art of the first half of the book to the warmth of documentary video in the second. She watches with us, evoking the jeopardy and sheer joy of young Palestinians leaping up and onto the architecture which was meant to constrain them. This is a book for our times.'
Richard Price
ISBN: 9781800175921
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
102 pages