The Garden of Distances: Drawings and Poems

by Robert Kelly, Brigitte Mahlknecht

An Italian painter and an American poet briefly meet once and, liking one another's work, decide to experiment with the interaction of visual text and verbal text. The Garden of Distances is the a marriage of 38 etchings with a book-length multipart interlocking poem. It was not a matter of person responding to person but of work responding to work. The pictures and texts were exchanged by fax, and the whole process carried out from afar between New York City, Annandale-on-Hudson, and Bolzano (Italy), from July to October, 1998. The distances between the artists became emblematic of the distances negotiated in the drawings and in the texts, which are like all the joyful and sorrowful distances between people.

Each time it was the drawing that came first, then the text tried to answer it. And to that answer the next drawing somehow came to speak-- answer on top of answer till the gardening was done. Brigitte Mahlknecht's 38 etchings (two of which are reproduced in color) are finely detailed maps of the unconscious, packed spaces the sizes of dreams, archetypal spoor. Robert Kelly's poems are songs of enormous beauty, endlessly inventive, reflexive, inviting and open.

This edition of The Garden of Distances is published in the U.S. by special arrangement with Edition Per Procura of Vienna.

205 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2001

About the author

Kelly has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 (1995) and a collection of short fictions, A Transparent Tree (1985). Many were published by the Black Sparrow Press. He also edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965).Kelly was of great help to the Hungryalist group of poets of India during the trial of Malay Roychoudhury,with whom he had correspondence,now archived at Kolkata.

Kelly received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award (1980) for Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News and the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991) for In Time.