Invisible World Is in Decline
By (Author) Bruce Whiteman
ECW Press,Canada
ECW Press,Canada
1st September 2000
5th ed.
Canada
General
Non Fiction
811.54
Paperback
102
This continuing prose poem attempts to come to terms with some of the most basic human experiences, from sex and language to the central place of light in our lives. Book V expands upon these obsessions, particularly the relationship between the body and the world and the experience of light; it adds a number of new ones as well. The failed artist is imagined as a consummate forger, expertly capable of mimicry, but wholly a fraud at any genuine work or feeling. A religious impetus, largely unstated until now, begins to be consecrated in this book with a series of short lyric poems concerning the redemptive qualities of love.
Bruce Whiteman has worked as a rare book librarian at both McMaster and McGill. He is currently the head librarian of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Whiteman has published extensively as a poet, scholar, cultural historian, and book reviewer. He is the author of Visible Stars: New and Selected Poems, as well as books on the painter J. E. H. MacDonald and on the history of publishing in Quebec. With Francis Farley-Chevrier he has translated the work of the Quebec poet Franois Charron. He lives in Santa Monica, California.