Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines

Book excerpt: IMAGINARIUM: SIGHTINGS, GALLERIES, SIGHTLINES, A. Robert Lee’s latest collection of poetry, turns on two connecting keynotes: imagination and sight. Across a broad canvas each of its sequences explores the ways we go about imagining as much as seeing reality. Sightings, which opens the book, turns upon a dozen or so celebrated paintings, among them J.M.W. Turner and Frida Kahlo. Galleriesextends the usual meaning of the term to include vantage-points like a French archeological cave, a Bosphorus Straits crossing and a Tokyo station. Sightlines frames a run of personal encounters within the heights and widths of buildings and landscapes – whether different Metro stations, or a major Japanese waterfall or Memphis’s Beale Street. IMAGINARIUM explores yet other kinds of seeing, including poems that use bird flight as metaphors of imagination, airplane travel and its larger meanings of self-journey, Science Fiction film and the envisioning of other worlds, a roster of US photography, and imagination itself as a process to be imagined. In sum the reader is invited into a two-way exchange, imagination as seeing, seeing as imagination.