Morphology

Poetry. Art. "In the first image of Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump's MORPHOLOGY, the eye follows train tracks into a distant background of earth-meets-sky, the sky a near circle of light, presenting at the same time an enclosure and an eternity. The first text suggests a linkage of thinking and seeing: if I think it, it appears. Magic. The magic here concerns the relationship of verbal to visual, a relationship always lively, never predictable. The text is no less visual than the photographs, and at times even the letters take one's attention (and one's breath away); in the section in which it is stated that all men are pencils, two times the letter 'y' (why? Y chromosome? a leaning 'v' standing on one leaning leg? all these & more) is separated from its word and enlarged to become a visual presence, an occupier of space on the page, in the eye, in the mind...If you're looking for something, you will find it here. If you're not looking for something, you will find it here, where 'someone else is standing at the other end of that sentence,' a thought you hear while looking at a dimmed and timeless photograph of water meeting earth meeting clouds, and you gain a sense that the sentence is ongoing and connects everything that you are with everything you have seen, and that it will go on for miles and miles and miles without ending. This book is magic. I want to read it a thousand times"--Charles Alexander.