Figures & Figurations

<p>A beautiful gift edition of Figures &amp; Figurations: the collaboration between the Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz and his wife of thirty years, the artist Marie José Paz.</p>Figures &amp; Figurations, one of the last works completed by the great late Mexican poet Octavio Paz before his death in 1998, is a stunning collaborative project with his wife, the acclaimed artist Marie José 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. In addition to the gorgeous full-color art, this bilingual edition features Eliot Weinberger's excellent translations, as well as an essay by Octavio Paz on Marie José Paz's work, &quot;The Whitecaps of Time,&quot; 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 the linguist Roman Jakobson and Elizabeth Bishop. &quot;These objects sometimes surprise us,&quot; he writes, &quot;and sometimes make us dream or laugh (humor is one of the poles of her work) . Signs that invite us on a motionless voyage of fantasy, bridges to the indefinitely small or galactic distances, windows that open on a nowhere. Marie José's art is a dialog between here and there.&quot; An illuminating afterword by the eminent French poet Yves Bonnefoy completes this edition.