Tony Harrison · The Fire-Gap, a poem with two tails
Long vertical leporello accordion book in four sections in which the poem takes on the form of a rattlesnake with ‘a fire-gap’ running through it. The calligrammatic poem bifurcates at the end to offer two alternative endings, one hopeful, the other not. A defence of the snake and an evocation of the Cold War period, one summer in Florida spent with his wife, the diva Teresa Stratas, at a time when the dispatching of a nuclear bomb from the US seemed imminent and wholly plausible. The pochoir-painted figure within the circular shape at the end of the poem represents a tightrope walker precariously holding onto a globe and not ‘Christ on the Cross’ as asserted in the official bibliography of Harrison by eminent scholar John Kaiser.
3 copies were bound up in leather and rattlesnake skin (a dead rattler found on the poet’s land), Caine has some of this snakeskin left if a special binding were required.
Un texte ‘à deux queues’– en forme de serpent étendu verticalement – qui propose deux lectures possibles, bifurquant pour offrir une chute heureuse et une chute pessimiste, l’une se terminant sur un point éclairé, l’autre sur un point noir. Un long et très impressionnant poème-affiche calligramme avec une image pochoirée en noir.
