The Cabbage of Paradise: The Merzbook and Other Poems

Colin Morton’s The Cabbage of Paradise consists of a recasting of material from his notable, long out-of-print 1987 collection The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems, which dramatizes the great German artist’s life and aesthetics, now interspersed with the author’s own concrete poems and Dadaist-influenced texts and collages. A lively dialogue is thus generated with the art and poetics of a watershed era whose impact continues to be felt. Schwitters proclaimed that his art was apolitical, but eventually had to flee from the Nazis, who destroyed his “decadent” work. Morton’s inventive treatment vividly illuminates the situation of art and the artist in both the last century and our own.