BOMB, by Clark Coolidge with Illustrations by Keith Waldrop

Granary Books, 2000, First edition, 48 pp., 8" X 10", Softcover

Fine

Bomb is a meditation on a book of photographs that document the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos. The 30-page poem begins with epigraphs by Democritus, Gregory Corso, and André Breton/Paul Éluard before embarking upon its own project of lucid investigation via an elliptical glancing narration: “Put the bomb in a glass vase/add dust and forget.” Bomb is sharp, stark, rhythmic; Coolidge tangles with the dreamlike oddness of the photographs in fits and starts of language with an explosive beauty. Waldrop’s series of collages are literal reworkings of the original pictures: deep blacks and bright whites excavated from the book, remade here in the image of the poem.