Watchfiends & Rack Screams
In French poetic thinking, Artaud is one of the so-called poetes maudits, those cursed creators, whose immediate predecessors were Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Artaud, the writer-dramatist-actor, has been, in spite of his weird, violent, incendiary style, a visionary and a seminal influence on French avant-garde circles. Eshelman and Bador present in this anthology a sufficiently representative quantity of Artaud's writings, including two influential letters, poems, and a short essay on his drawings, all from the period 1945 to 1948. The poems, "Artaud the Momo" (slang for "fool") and "Here Lies," written during and following his incarceration in an asylum, reconstruct his mental state. There is little doubt that his poems contain an element of masterful madness, reflecting his inner complexities and what he has endured. His last work, "To Have Done with the Judgment of God," is a showcase of Artaud's tremendous literary talent. The bilingual presentations and the lucid introduction prove helpful. Recommended for literary collections.?Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.