Figures & Figurations, one of the last works completed by the great
late Mexican poet Octavio Paz before his death in 1998, is a stunning
collaborative project with his wife, the acclaimed artist Marie José
Paz. In response to ten of her collage-constructions, he wrote ten new
short poems; she in turn created two new artworks in response to two of
his earlier poems. In addition to the gorgeous full-color art, this
bilingual edition features Eliot Weinberger's excellent translations, as
well as an essay by Octavio Paz on Marie José Paz's work, The Whitecaps
of Time, in which he relates how her friendship with Joseph Cornell
became a stimulus for her assemblages and how she was further spurred on
by other friends, such as the linguist Roman Jakobson and Elizabeth
Bishop. These objects sometimes surprise us, he writes, and sometimes
make us dream or laugh (humor is one of the poles of her work). Signs
that invite us on a motionless voyage of fantasy, bridges to the
indefinitely small or galactic distances, windows that open on a
nowhere. Marie José's art is a dialog between here and there. An
illuminating afterword by the eminent French poet Yves Bonnefoy
completes this edition.