Product Description

THE WORLD OF RICHARD DADD is an intriguing collection of poetry concerning the rememberances of a dark era, that is playfully autobiographical and hauntingly dreamlike in it's vision.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #968235 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 88 pages

Review
Michael Mott (offers) a sensitive register of moods and thoughts that Dadd's strange and haunting imagery brings into being. -- Fred Chappell

Perfectly framed and rendered with intelligence and craft. -- Betty Adcock

With each collection (Michael Mott) reinvents and restores the wounded world. -- George Garrett

About the Author
Michael Mott has published nine collections of poetry, four novels, and an award-winning biography. Born in London, his father was English, his mother a sculptor from Denver, Colorado. He came to America in 1966 to act as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. A Guggenheim Fellow, Mott was, twice, Writer-in-Residence at The College of William and Mary. He won the Allen Tate Prize in Poetry in 2002.

Customer Reviews

The worlds of Richard Dadd and Michael Mott
Richard Dadd is probably best known for two things: his enigmatic and hallucinatory fairy paintings and the fact that he murdered his father.

In 'The World of Richard Dadd', Michael Mott reflects upon Dadd, the artist and the son, but intertwines this with thoughts about his own childhood in north London on the eve of the Second World War; a childhood shared by Thom Gunn to whom the book is dedicated.

The strands of the book are skillfully mingled, partly because they share a similar mood where dreamlike memory distilled by time. Mott evokes a childhood where parents are distant exotic beings, usually viewed through the upstairs banisters, where children climb monkey puzzle trees and dress up in their absent parents' clothes.

This is not to say this is a comfortable book. Mott is painfully honest about the patriarchal society in which he was brought up, and its consequences in the wider world - the shadow of war hangs over the book.

All in all, a thought-provoking collection from an accomplished poet, full of allusive and memorable images.

My one criticism is of the reproductions of Dadd's work inside the book - they are murky and hard to discern.