Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination by Andrea Brady has just been published by Krupskaya. (Three parts of Wildfire were printed in CLR2.) This is extraordinary poetry; I think the following publisher/author statement says all that I’d like to:
WILDFIRE is a verse essay. It is trying to persuade us, to recognize that certain catastrophes and felicities are not inevitable. It concerns the history of incendiary devices, of the evolution of Greek fire from a divine secret which could sustain or destroy empires, into white phosphorus and napalm; the elliptical fires of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle’s service to Alexander in the fashioning of pyrotechnics, the burning/blooming/mating bodies of G. H. Schubert and the self-feeding crowds of Elias Canetti; mechanisms to project fire, to make it burn on water and stick to wood and skin, to keep it off the walls of the besieged towns, and what those mechanisms (projection and defense) have done to geometry; the courts of fire, the legal chamber and the hortus conclusus, and the margins of ambiguity where it is lobbed with impunity; embedded nuggets and embedded reporters, the discovery of the chemical element, industrial tragedy, the resistance of the matchgirls at Bryant & May, the corruption of Quaker capitalists, washing powder and toothpaste. It is an etiology of metaphors, “shake-n-bake” and whisky pete and phantom fury. It is also an argument about obscurity and illumination: WILDFIRE does both, smokes the bright air and singes the night with trajectories. And so an interrogation of writing practices which fume as much as they enlighten.
In fact, I might add to this description, that in addition to its historical elements, Wildfire contains an element of political engagement that at once overrides the debate over political/apathetic poetry and makes that debate seem somehow behind the times, too slow. Even more, perhaps, than in Andrea’s letter to the CLR on political engagement, Wildfire demonstrates precisely what can be done—crucially, it seems to me, without cynicism—within the confines of overtly politicized subject matter.
Wildfire is available for purchase via Small Press Distribution:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781928650317/wildfire-a-verse-essay-on-obscurity-and-illumination.aspx
Or, perhaps more conveniently, Andrea is accepting cheques for £10 + £1 p&p, payable to her at: 26 Allerton Road, London N16 5UJ.
