Logic of the Stairwelland other images
Published 15 February 2011
ISBN 9781848611610
Paperback, 80pp, 8 x 5ins, £8.95 / $15
Published by Shearsman Books
As a visual artist, Marc Atkins fills his work with hints and clues to a world of hidden spaces and scenarios. Here, in his writing, that world is disclosed in meticulous detail. It amounts to a reserve collection of the felt unknown, a whole new dimension that lies just beyond the familiar, on the edges of the utterly strange
— Rod Mengham
This fascinating, intoxicating and often hallucinatory book ranks amongst the best prose poetry collections of the last half-century. Atkins is a Surrealist visionary whose prose creates a murmuring dream in every sentence, a visual universe in every paragraph. His Logic of the Stairwell takes you into a world of verbi-voco-visual intrigues that explore the mechanisms of perception and memory while blurring accepted boundaries between the narrative and the lyrical, the sensuous and the philosophical, the essential and the residual.
— Michel Delville, author of The American Prose Poem
Comments:
I took my time reading the Logic of the Stairwell, it's not a book you should get through in one go. Beautiful and moving, with a lot of variety in tempo. Some passages are so dense, so packed with potential meanings, that they just go by me, but I look forward to returning to them. I think that the greatest pleasure for me as a reader, apart from the imagery as such, was from the buildup of tension in a paragraph, and then the release taking an unexpected direction and form. A sly alteration, substitution, play on words and idioms, bringing Ashbery's procedures to mind. This is much stronger, to my mind, than the typically surrealist metaphors and the syntax they entail, and of which you have used quite a few. But these are just technical remarks. The book is wonderful, profound, real in the most intimate, emotional sense, without being obtrusive about this. A difficult pleasure, and all the more pleasurable for that.
Tadeusz Pioro, poet, prose writer, columnist, literary historian and translator
Review by Sam Murphy 2011, Stride magazine.:
The thick detail of Atkins language lends his writing to prose poetry, often with asides of short sentences, to add whimsy and ever more detail to the worlds he creates...
Read the full review here.