Bomb

A landmark first-time collaboration between poet Clark Coolidge and writer/scholar/artist Keith Waldrop, Bomb is a meditation on a book of photographs that document the Manhattan Project. Coolidge's thirty-page poem begins with epigraphs by Democritus, Gregory Corso and Andre Breton/Paul Eluard, and continues in an elliptical, glancing narrative style that lucidly investigates a subject often too traumatic to consider directly the impact of the atomic bomb on our lives. Or should we say instead, the bomb's impact on our everyday lives. As Coolidge puts it, the general tendency has been to 'put the bomb in a glass vase/add dust and forget.' Like all of Coolidge's work, Bomb is sharp, stark, and rhythmic; the poet here tangles with the dreamlike oddness of the photographs at hand in fits and starts of language with an explosive beauty. Keith Waldrop's series of collages are literal reworkings of the original pictures: deep blacks and bright whites excavated from the book, remade here in the image of the poem.