Lucas van Leyden... Ornamental engraving ...1528

Hans Erni... Satyr...1958

For Benjamin PERET...

Max Ernst - illustration for La Breis Galante 1949 by Benjamin Peret

 TOM TOM 1 for Benjamin Peret

even the river of earth blood

even the blood of the ruptured sun

even the blood of a hundred nails of sun

even the blood of the suicide fire beasts

even the blood of ashes blood of salt blood

of bloods of love

even the flaming blood of the fire bird

herons and falcons

rise and burn

AIME CESAIRE

Edmond Jabès ... poem...

From "Groundless,"

by Edmond Jabès (b. Cairo, 1912–d. Paris, 1991)

Translated by Keith Waldrop

I

No-man's-land, obsessed page

A dwelling-place is a long insomnia

in the hooded trails of a mine.

My days are days of roots,

love's yoke extolled.

The sky is always to cross and

foreground to be bed with new nights.

I form, in my weeds,

a wedge in the wall's opaque brightness.

The earth is steeped in

empty dreams of travel.

VI

Land beyond night, which the sun wrenches from

meditation, from the thorns of doubt.

Flowers parade their artful candor. The stems

emulate grand adventures in space.

Honey flows between stones

which this cement will join.

VII

Around the branches, the world mimes its hunger.

So many cries for a tree, fragrant god to

plant, to bend by a magic round. . .

My secrets are orchards.

There is no trick to the mystery.

* with thanks to Ruairi

Unica Zürn... drawing...

she opens out, forming a shining star 
made of countless new arms and legs 

and necks and heads, 

she becomes a beautiful, flower-like monstrosity....  

from the Man of Jasmine -Unica Zürn

*with  thanks to Wladd Muta

my works...Frida

what Frida gave me ...

Edvard Munch...drawing... c1908/9

previous MUNCH

Andre Domin ...illustration for "Litanies de la Rose"...1919

"Litanies de la Rose"
Remy de Gourmont (Author)
Paris: Editions Rene Kieffer, 1919

Rose with dark eyes,
mirror of your nothingness,
rose with dark eyes,
make us believe in the mystery,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of pure gold,
oh safe deposit of the ideal,
rose the colour of pure gold,
give us the key of your womb,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Rose the colour of silver,
censer of our dreams,
rose the colour of silver,
take our heart and turn it into smoke,
hypocrite flower,
flower of silence.

Remy de Gourmont

William Sharp, a.k.a. 'Fiona Macleod' & John Duncan...The Celtic Twilight

                                                         ETAIN

[Dreamily

I have heard. . . . I have dreamed. . . .I,
too, have heard,
Have sung . . . that song: O lordly ones that
dwell
In secret places in the hollow hills,
Who have put moonlit dreams into my mind
And filled my noons with visions, from afar
I hear sweet dewfall voices, and the clink,
The delicate silvery spring and clink
Of faery lances underneath the moon.

from the immortal hour by Fiona Macleod

an enjoyable paper on Sharp and Duncan and the Celtic Twilight

Lynd Ward... Mad Man's Drum.. Part 1

a few scans from one of my favourite artists, and one of the finest wood engravers of the twentieth century .. 

Lynd Ward

 Mad Man Drum ~ A Novel in Woodcuts

Cadavre Exquis... Affections...

S Dali, Gala, A Breton, V Hugo

Apuleius' ... "Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass"... illustrations and translations...

'

'Lend me your ear, reader: you shall enjoy yourself'

 The Golden Ass 

Illustrations and translations of the Latin novel the

Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius

Isis Revealed

illustrated by Percival Goodman. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1932.

‘Looking up I saw the full orb of the Moon shining with peculiar lustre and that very moment emerging from the waves of the sea. Then the thought came to me that this was the hour of silence and loneliness when my prayers might avail. For I knew that the Moon was the primal Goddess of supreme sway; that all human beings are vitalised by the divine influence of her light; that all the bodies which are on earth, or in the heavens, or in the sea, increase when she waxes, and decline when she wanes. Considering this, therefore, and feeling that Fate was now satiated with my endless miseries and at last licensed a hope of salvation, I determined to implore the august image of the risen Goddess.
  So, shaking off my tiredness, I scrambled to my feet and walked straight into the sea into order to purify myself. I immersed my head seven times because (according to the divine Pythagoras) that number is specially suited for all ritual-acts; and then, speaking with lively joy, I lifted my tear-wet face in supplication to the irresistible Goddess: ....

translated by Jack Lindsay

illustrated by Percival Goodman. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1932.



“Queen of Heaven, whether you are fostering Ceres the motherly nurse of all growth, who (gladdened at the discovery of your lost daughter) abolished brutish nutriment of the primitive acorn and pointed the way to gentler food (as is yet shown in the tilling of the fields of Eleusis); or whether you are celestial Venus who in the first moment of Creation min

gled the opposing sexes in the generation of mutual desires, and who (after sowing in humanity the seeds of indestructible continuing life) are now worshipped in the wave-washed shrine of Paphos; or whether you are the sister of Phoebus, who by relieving the pangs of childbirth travail with soothing remedies have brought safe into the world lives innumerable, and who are now venerated in the thronged sanctuary of Ephesus; or whether you are Proserpine, terrible with the howls of midnight, whose triple face has power to ward off the assaults of ghosts and to close the cracks in the earth, and who wander through many a grove, propitiated in divers manners, illuminating the walls of all cities with beams of female light, nurturing the glad seeds in the earth with your damp heat, and dispensing abroad your dim radiance when the sun has abandoned us—O by whatever name, and by whatever rite, and in whatever form, it is permitted to invoke you, come now and succour me in the hour of my calamity. Support my broken life, and give me rest and peace after the tribulations of my lot. Let there be an end to the toils that weary me, and an end to the snares that beset me. Remove from me the hateful shape of a beast, and restore me to the sight of those that love me. Restore me to Lucius, my lost self. But if an offended god pursues me implacably, then grant me death at least since life is denied me.”

Lucius restored to human shape by the Grace of Isis

illustrated by Jean de Bosschère.  London: John Lane - The Bodley Head, 1923.

Thus the divine shape breathing out the pleasant spice of fertill Arabia, disdained not with her divine voyce to utter these words unto me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers hath mooved mee to succour thee. I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven, the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the æthiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the ægyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call mee Queene Isis…’

translated by William Adlington