BOOKS / Picasso's own poetry: Picasso: Collected Writings: Aurum Press, pounds 90
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Your support makes all the difference.Few people think of Picasso as a writer, for obvious reasons. Yet writing was always important to him, and became especially so after 1939, when a personal crisis briefly stopped him painting. The two plays and more than 340 poetic texts he produced over the next 20 years often moved across a narrow range of intense obsessions, based on colour perception and the synaesthetic experience so important to Surrealism.
Below, one of 200 superb facsimiles in Picasso: Collected Writings (Aurum Press pounds 90), which presents his complete writings (with commentary) in French and Spanish.
7 JUNE XXXVI
at the curtain wrenched from flying hands by tousled hair
the ladder of the scent of verbena leaves
pierced by the cries of swallows in geometric flights of desire
the hotch-potch of the prism at full tilt
flower-weapon plunged into the heart
breathes out its indifference
its powdery costume cut in the shape of an eagle's head
of the snows of music of the arrows of a clown
the fake harvester of stars
arms in the satin-stitch sleeves of a bodice
unravels the nest of vipers in the tree of the watchers asleep
on the soft fires cutting the smell of silence
hung from the slats of the shutter
emerges from the drum beating the call to the decimal point of love
in the astonished eye of the toro with its wings unfurled
swimming naked in the smell of the blue locked round the neck of the dusty sun
hidden under the shivering bed
bogged down in the shadow of the whip-lash stammered out by a bloodless green
nestling in a pellet of memories tossed into ash
at the moment when the wheel balances its luck
15 JUNE XXXVI
garlic laughs at its colour a star of russet leaves
laughs in mockery at the rose-pink the dagger its colour
drives in
garlic in a star of russet leaves
laughs in malice at the dagger of roses smelling of the star
that falls
in russet leaves
garlic on the wing
(Photograph omitted)
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