Void Studies PBS Recommendation Winter 2016

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PBS Recommendation – Winter2016

Void Studies, Rachael Boast‘s extraordinary new collection, realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never got round to writing. tudes nanteswas to consist of poems written as musical tudes; these would not convey any direct message, but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject.

This ‘impossible project’ has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing way: these tone poems are indeed works of pure music – but despite their esoteric nature, are by no means ‘difficult’: instead they conjure the recognizable states, emotions, moods, ambiances and strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a kind of otherworldly lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book – one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer some of the most profound questions we can frame.