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Kuene (2013)

by Lydia Davis(Favorite Author)

4.06 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Flamme

review 1: ITS REALLY A MYSTERY - THREE COWS MAKING GREAT LITERATURE?!"The Cows" is a demonstration of "how to use your eyes". The pictures following the text (Davis' own photos of cows) is the only thing not to like in this little booklet, not that they are necessary bad - but they seem to be just dropped on to the pages, which doesn't do the text much good. The text, in its abundant simplistic way, is giving us all the images we need.
review 2: Another absolutely precise exercise in writing and observation, this time on an intentionally undramatic subject, three cows across the street from Davis's house. For me, the interest is in observing the faint ghosts of other kinds of writing hovering around the nearly clean skeletons of her descriptions. A touch of surrealism, o... moref anima rights, of detective stories, of transcendentalism... no paragraph is pure in the sense that a haiku can appear pure. (Appear, not be.)I am not as happy with the pictures, simply because they are too loosely correlated with the text. Why can't a writer as exacting as Davis demand the same of her images? On a page where the prose insists that she sees the cows only from a great distance and through a restricted angle of view, we get a photo of cows taken from the edge of their pasture. The difference is not made into a theme, either in the text (which doesn't acknowledge the viewpoint of the photos), or in the photos (which shift without rhyme or reason from telephoto to close-up). It makes images seem weak: it appears it's not right to request too much of them. I think the opposite. less

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