Figures & Figurations

Figures & Figurations, one of the last books completed by the late Mexican poet Octavio Paz before his death in 1998, is a collaborative effort with his wife of thirty years, the artist Marie Jose Paz. In response to ten of her collage-constructions, he wrote ten new short poems; she in turn created two new artworks in response to two of his earlier poems. Twelve poems, twelve pieces of art reproduced in full color, in a book first published in Spanish in 1999 and now appearing in a bilingual edition.In addition to the poems and collage-constructions, Figures & Figurations includes an essay by Octavio Paz on Marie Jose Paz's work, "The Whitecaps of Time, " in which he relates how her friendship with Joseph Cornell became a stimulus for her assemblages and how she was further spurred on by other friends, such as Roman Jakobson and Elizabeth Bishop. "These objects sometime surprise us, " he writes, "sometimes make us laugh or dream. Signs that invite us to a motionless voyage of fantasy, bridgesto the infinitely small or galactic distances, windows that open on to nowhere. The art of Marie Jose is a dialogue between here and there."Paz, Octavio is the author of 'Figures & Figurations', published 2002 under ISBN 9780811215244 and ISBN 0811215245.