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Inconceivable!

Horace proclaimed, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” and since then poets have wondered about the validity of “as in painting, so in poetry,” even as they make artworks the subjects of their poems. Here is the painting and there is the experiencing poet. But the third thing, the poem, is all that matters.

Spend an hour talking with a poet or novelist about their work and chances are they’ll say something about the need to avoid repetition, to change and reinvent. In a 2005 interview with Jonathan Lethem in The Believer, Paul Auster gave his rendition of holding patterns are forbidden.

In 1957 Eugene Smith moved into a dilapidated 4th-floor loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, between 28th and 29th Streets in Manhattan. He was 38 years old, at the height of his notoriety as a photojournalist.

Having attempted to hang himself from a tree, the unnamed narrator of Cockroach must meet with a psychiatrist after his release from a state-run clinic. At the health centre, “Everyone knows that you are going to confess something,” he says, “something evil that was done to you, something evil that you did. Still, the past is all in the past.

Kara Candito’s first book of poems, Taste of Cherry, gathers its dramatic force by recounting and weighing recent events, usually of an intimate nature. The world is recalled as a series of shocks to the senses – told with the bravura of an initiate challenged to fashion a self that measures up to such startling experiences.