William Benton

From the perspectives of an accomplished contemporary artist, William Benton's MARMALADE takes the words of the French poet Mallarme (note pun) into an American idiom that both explodes and tightens poetic mysteries and mischief. Some 50 years from its first publication, complemented with the original watercolors of James McGarrill, this classic of autonomic and visionary translation remains testament to our human and "faunean" imagination unbridled. As the poet Guy Davenport writes in his introduction, "And if one dreamed, and was too feral to sort dream from flesh, and took up a flute and began to see how dream and reality are flower and leaf on the one stem, and a French poet Mallarme] in a plaid shawl who loved old gardens and mirrors and Greek poetry wrote what he thought the faun thought, and an American poet Benton] has a bright impulse to speak for Mallarm speaking for the faun? Turn the page and read on."

As Ronald Johnson wrote, William Benton’s witty and inventive Birds single-handedly resurrected the Concrete Poetry movement. First published in 1972 by the Graphic Arts Workshop of the Portland Museum Art School in Oregon, as a limited edition of 200 copies, this new edition includes an introduction by Benton as well as several new poems.

This book does what few art books do. It locates the elevated and often esoteric world of art in the personal depths of the author's life. Acclaimed poet and novelist William Benton lets us see what he sees with both candor and brilliance. As the critic Lilly Wei observed, "He tells us something about the paradoxes of love at the same time that he tells us about . . . art." From Elizabeth Bishop, whose paintings he first brought to light, to Vermeer (real and fake), from El Greco to Joan Brown to an autobiographical concordance of the drawings of Georges Seurat, Eye Contact is in every sense a dazzling encounter.

A singular life often circles around a singular moment, an occasion when one's life in the world is defined forever and the emotional vocabulary set. For the extraordinary writer James Salter, this moment was contained in the fighter planes over Korea where, during his young manhood, he flew more than one hundred missions.James Salter is considered one of America's greatest prose stylists. The Arm of Flesh (later revised and retitled Cassada) and his first novel, The Hunters, are legendary in military circles for their descriptions of flying and aerial combat. A former Air Force pilot who flew F-86 fighters in Korea, Salter writes with matchless insight about the terror and exhilaration of the pilot's life.