AT DUSK – Mark Valentine

Publisher’s description here: http://www.exoccidente.com/dusk.html

On final page of this book: “‘At Dusk’ has been limited to 235 numbered copies for sale, plus extra copies, which are reserved for private distribution. This is copy number” 20 (in red ink)

80 pages – including 17 stunning coloured ‘hard’ images with wonderful intricate building-scapes, cornerstones etc. scattered throughout.

Hedonistic cover partly spine-overlapped decadent shivery hardish velvet to the touch in black, partly stitched yellow gorgeousness to the renewed touch with hardened heart, but a heart not as hard as the jacketless cover itself. Office-orientated inside cover image at either end of the book. Luxury stiff paper pages.

EXPOSITION INTERNATIONALE – Bucharest – MMXII

This is my fifth post-real-time review after recently announcing my retirement from real-time reviewing following four ostensibly self- and autre-fulfilling years doing it.

AT DUSK by Mark Valentine is a series of short prose pieces that ostensibly channel into us visionary glances of the between-world-war poets generated by an erstwhile Europe vision, that remarkably combines all the bespoke beauty of language we expect from this author but here with new souls as writers, new readers as souls, too. For example, at one point, I had a premonition of reading this book on my own death bed (whenever that should turn out to be), as the last book I read or re-read.

 

“Always Autumn, leaves the surrendered coins of Summer, payment for a passage to the dark.”

There is a sense of a telling gestalt with the world today, the news today, this precise day I write this,  as with mention here of ‘Israfel’ … and with another recent book emanating from this publisher: “The saints in their tombs are starting to smile.” All is meant to be.

The Peacock Escritoire has become here a series of “viola cases” with “viola chords“.

I am already entranced. But I shall re-read it one day, resisting the strong temptation or ‘Desnos’ to do so till then. (It definitely needs reading several times).

“We walk in this world as if it were the only one. Yet there is a side-step when we seem to stray into another. A few moments pass, we waver on the brink of a revelation. We could dissolve into another existence.” …towards, eventually into, this exquisite book.

‘Always Autumn’ … FOREVER AUTUMN

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PS: the 17 amazing photographs by Geticus Polus
– one of which has a nice pussy-cat.