Bücher von Jim Burns

This book contains reviews submitted to the Northern Review of Books website during 2021 and 2022 plus articles previously printed in The Crazy Oik magazine.

It's difficult to get away from Paris when writing about art, and several reviews in this collection inevitably refer to the city, though not only for art but also for the cafés, cabarets and other locations where artists and writers met to socialise. Paris wasn't the only place where such activity happened, so London, Berlin, New York, and several other cities also come into view. As a background to what went on artistically in Paris there is a review of a book dealing with the "vice, crime and poverty" which shows that it was all there while the painters and poets and their patrons carried on their conversation. This isn't to single out Paris for its perversities, and the review of writing from nineteenth century Prague shows that prostitution and its perils thrived there. As before, I've taken the liberty of including a handful of short prose pieces. They're not stories, in the strict sense of the word, and perhaps "sketches" best describes them?

As in the previous collection, Paris has a place in this one, with re-views/essays about various artists, writers, expatriates, editors, and others who were in the city at one time or another. I have to admit that I'm generally looking back in these pieces to the Paris of the 1890s or the 1920s, "e;golden periods"e;, as they're called, though in a review of poets in translation I do briefly comment on a collection of more-contemporary French left-wing poets. I doubt that they will be familiar to most British poetry readers, and that seems to me a good reason for reviewing them in the first place, and reprinting the re-view in this book. In case I'm accused of overlooking interesting British poets, there are reviews of several of them. These are from a list of several hundred books of poetry that I reviewed during a fifty years stint as a reviewer for the magazine, Ambit, edited by Martin Bax.One of the pleasures of writing for Ambit was that I wasn't asked to only deal with books from established poets.

This tenth collection of essays and reviews again throws the spotlight on Paris and some of the painters and places associated with the city. Montmartre in its heyday, the 1890s and thereabouts when Edgar Degas and Alphonse Mucha produced images of the spectacles to be seen in Paris and the leisure activities of its citizens. Some of them, at least. Neither artist was noted for painting scenes of working-class life, nor of poverty. To say that is not to condemn them for it. The same can be said of Matisse and Bonnard who largely created colourful canvases in the sun-drenched South of France. We need to appreciate artists for what they did, not accuse them for not doing what we think they should have done

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