Modigliani – Review

Modigliani

by Martin Gray
(Ekstasis Editions $12.00 96 pp.)
by Thomas Christian

The day after Modigliani died, his wife Jeanne, carrying their unborn child in her belly, jumped out a window to her death fusing their eternity together in the Everafter. You know, you just can’t find that kind of woman anymore.

Amadeo Modigliani lived a short but full life. Born in Italy in 1884, he knew illness, fever, and financial bankruptcy at a young age. Long after his passing, he is remembered for his creations, which inspire artists to the present day.

Martin Gray has taken on an ambitious project in Modigliani, and approaches his subject from an unusual point of entry. As he had done previously with Blues for Bird, his biography of Charlie Parker, Gray presents Modigliani’s life in the narrative style of an epic poem. “Blue nudes and scarlet trees/green beasts and flesh-toned seas/as if nature was/a mood chameleon.” 152 verses of sing-song prose that celebrate the life of the artist and cut the barrier-slack of the time-space constraint. Of Modigliani’s distinctive almond-eyed oval-faced girls, Gray writes, “his people necks like columns/and elongated faces/as if cut into planes/their noses sharply drawn.”

Informative and original, a work such as Gray’s won’t show up on the shelves of your local bookstore (of course not!), but can be acquired by writing Ekstasis Editions Canada Ltd., (Box 8474 Main Postal Outlet, Victoria BC Canada VSW 3S1). Future treatments are slated for Delmore Schwartz, Jack Kerouac, and Jackson Pollock.