Windfalls and Disruptions

 Gather ye rosebuds while ye may —Robert Herrick, 1648

I have found it useful to begin reviews of poetry with a small excursus. So I start with a comment on Les Murray’s Poems the Size of Photographs which can be taken as a locus classicus (hot spot) for exploring a relationship between word and image. What can be on a page?

That pairing can be pushed hard in the digital age when pixel scanning can reduce image and text to bits and bytes. Pixels or bildpunkts drive the mind down to the smallest representational elements and (after my reference to Murray), both Tim Hurburgh and Marilyn Peck contain this crossover element in their poetry.

Both are concerned with word and image and both are representational artists who paint as well as write verse. Peck is a miniaturist in painting and more expansive in verse. Hurburgh is more expressionist-expansive in image but more micro and disciplined in verse. He looks for the architect’s line.

Both unintentionally challenge what I take…