In Poetry and in Painting – Review of 'After Cézanne' by Maitreyabandhu
The poetry collection, After Cézanne, an illustrated meditation on Cézanne’s life is unlike any other I’ve reviewed. The book has a substantial Foreword written by Art Historian Christopher Lloyd, an essay in itself outlining Cézanne’s temperament, passion, and struggles confirmed and asserted through the poetry later, ‘In a rage with everything, exhausted / and defeated by working on the mountain,’ (‘Cézanne in the Studio’)
Art lovers will be enthralled by the twenty-six colour plates – portrait, still life, and landscape spanning decades of Cézanne’s work – intrinsic to Maitreyabandhu’s collection. Extensive detailed notes (over eight pages) are provided – paragraph after paragraph of quotations and background information on paintings, historical context and correspondence Forty-five poems are given such notation making this a valuable source for further research.
Whilst the references and Foreword create something of an academic book, there is nothing dry or heavy about the collection. After Cézanne deserves and repays slow reading, there is much to take in and a striking aspect of the collection is the use of quotations within poems grounding the work in Cézanne’s biography but also giving a sense of his place in the life of other artists, friends and models painted. References to Zola and Rilke proliferate and the book is populated by a great cast of artists including, Braque, Picasso, Raphael, Dürer, Chardin, McComb, Matisse, Renoir, Degas, Redon, Vuillard, Bonnard, Signac, Manet, Courbet, Rembrandt, and Poussin. There’s a section dedicated to Matisse (‘This Perpetual Dazzlement’, ‘Cut-outs’, ‘Matisse in the Studio’).
Maitreyabandhu resurrects the important characters of Cézanne’s life: his wife (‘Madame Cézanne with Anti-representational Effects’), mother (‘The Artist’s Mother’), and close friend Pissarro for instance (‘The Pissarro Portrait’). Interconnections between artists and in some cases poets are exposed: Wallace Stevens, (‘A Worm Composing on a Straw’), Seamus Heaney (‘For the Artist of Anahorish’), and Pissarro. The importance of Pissarro for Cezanne is movingly made explicit in ‘The Pissarro Portrait’,
They never did repeat that miracle year
tramping around Pontoise, speaking
in pictures, comparing strokes, comparing
patches, Cézanne’s daub, Pissarro’s dab,
and concluding,
They’d only met the once,
by accident, in the preceding twenty years –
old friends, bearing each other in mind.
I especially enjoyed the poems that focused on atmosphere which brought me close to Cézanne as a creator,
Cézanne took his time
with human things.
The vase leans slightly to
the left, so what we thought
fixed and stable is in flux
[‘Human Things’]
The poems are varied in form and length, the shortest poem a Ruba‘i of 4 lines (‘Sufficient Blueness to Give the Feel of Air’), the longest 113 lines (‘Einstein’s Watch’): a poem bringing together aspects of physics and philosophy, interrogating itself and the reader, and exploring themes of an outer and inner world and of a busy mind.
After Cézanne is many things: a monograph in verse, a study primer, a poetry collection, an illustrated life or meditation. I came away after immersion knowing the artist, wanting to know more, and wanting to spend time with the art-work.
