Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them. — Rainer Maria Rilke
First the steep mountain and clouds, then a red line of movement, and closer still, a cannon and a priest, a statue of the Virgin Mary, two Spanish women awkwardly carried in covered litters, the chained and enslaved Inca men . . .
The versos that appear in Brick 90 were excerpted from the original eleven Versos that comprised the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Annual Margaret Laurence Lecture delivered by Dionne Brand on May 25, 2012, at the Vancouver Public Library.
This Brick . . .
In the end and in the beginning it was the beauty and daring of Saramago’s long, elegant sentences, sometimes taking over pages, digressing in observations of his narrator or denials or second thought, elongating into treatises on will and speculation, . . .