Still • Life and Other Poems of Art and Artifice
Robert Vas Dias

A large collection (134 pages) of work from the last dozen years or so.

Cover from a detail of a painting by Stephen Chambers RA
Published by Shearsman Books, May 2010
ISBN 978 1 84861 121 4

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Leaping Down to Earth
Robert Vas Dias
Images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick

Leaping Down to Earth is a response in poetry to twelve pictures, six each by the British artists Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick, all of which are reproduced in colour. The poems are not about art and don’t aim to describe the images, but, as Vas Dias writes in the Preface, “convey what’s on my mind after I’ve lived with the images a while.” The design, in which each poem is printed on a semi-transparent sheet over its accompanying image, displays the integral connection between poem and image and yet allows each work to stand on its own. Leaping Down to Earth, writes Lee Harwood, “is a collection of poems that are some of the best Vas Dias has ever written. There’s a wit and liveliness to them that often makes me laugh out loud. But also more serious and moving threads weave through these poems. They can be sexy and funny and also include a subtle understanding of the complexities and struggles in human relationships.” Nicholas Usherwood writes in Galleries: “The call and response between the three of them is edgy, witty and often extremely touching, making this one of the most genuinely satisfying collaborations of its kind I’ve come across.”

“The visual-verbal interplay can be a fertile dialogue, and so it proves here….There is real depth here: perhaps most powerfully evident in ‘Outside Your Kitchen Window,’ the final poem-image pairing in the book.”

    Richard Aronowitz, The London Magazine

“ Leaping Down to Earth…is a beautiful book to hold and absorb. The poems are fun, lively and vibrant as well as being thought-provoking and effortlessly draw the reader into the world of the poems.”

    David Caddy, Tears in the Fence

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The Lascaux Variations
Robert Vas Dias, John Wright, Julia Farrer, Neil Crawford

The Lascaux Variations: Fractals of Being represents the combined effort by four people working in different disciplines - poetry, painting, text integration and design, and typography - to find a book format that reflects and recapitulates the concerns of the four-part poem, which explores questions about art and artifice, imagination and reality, line and space, the abstract and the non-objective, the enduring and transitional. The book is thus frankly experimental in concept and execution, harking back to the little collaborative books by the Russian Futurists of the early 19th century in which text and image were closely correlated, sometimes with text appearing as integral elements of the image itself, as happens in this book.

Both poet and artist had been inspired by separate visits to the paleolithic friezes of the Lascaux caves. Starting with early notes and drafts of the poem and with preliminary sketches by the artist John Wright, the project unfolded over a year, culminating in the finished poem and sixteen pastel-and-charcoal semi-abstract drawings by Wright. The painter-printmaker Julia Farrer then integrated words, phrases and sentences from the poem into scans of the images, which were then subjected to final typographical realisation by Neil Crawford, the professional typographer. After the total design was approved by both artists and the writer, the pages were printed by colour lithography and assembled loose-leaf in a pocket portfolio.

This is the poem’s first appearance in book form after its initial publication in The Warwick Review in the spring of 2009.

“John [Wright’s] images are so perfectly in sync with the feel of the poetry, its moods of reflection and love, of questioning. And the structure, the separate but not separate leaves, the flow of the images and words leading to the poems – unifying but in a way I haven't seen before. The intelligence of the production has a completely different feel from the usual art/poetry book as beautiful artifact. One has the experience of completeness, of a thoroughness to the design, more than a fusion--hard to put into words the way it all seems to work together for me.”

    Michael Heller

“The images work very well with the words and it is a beautiful production.”

    Maggi Hambling

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Select Things
Robert Vas Dias

Folded broadside sheet, containing eight poems, in a format borrowed from Michael Carlson’s Northern Lights Series, London.

“Anything that includes the subject of a junky car gets a thumbs up from this editor, unless it’s a piece-a-crap Ford.”

    Mark Spitzer, Exquisite Corpse 9, Summer 2001.

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Body-Part Word Sonnets
Using Expressions, Idioms, and Clichés
Robert Vas Dias

Poems printed on Japan mounted in folders containing two poems each, hand-bound in antique and contemporary marbled papers.

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Making Faces
Robert Vas Dias

The first book by Vas Dias published in Britain. Contains poems which first appeared in Encounter, Partisan Review, and Poetry Review, among others.

Cover illustration and design by David Chaloner
1975
Joe DiMaggio Press, London

“For those who have known Robert Vas Dias and his work for many years, a real occasion. This is a book of great subtlety and range, an exuberant, funny, touching, and frightening experience.”

    Toby Olson

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Speech Acts & Happenings
Robert Vas Dias

Of this, Vas Dias’s first major collection, the poet Paul Blackburn writes in his foreword: “This is a step. This is a step forwards. This is a foreword. No one knows why there must be a foreword to a peopled and perfectly capable book of poems, capable of speaking for itself numerous times (there are 70 poems in the book, does that help?), but they tell you there’s a reason. There must be a good one. I have thought of one; I thought of it at the beginning of this paragraph. This is a step for words. It surely is.”

Cover painting and design by R. B. Hart
1972
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis & New York
Hardbound and paperback editions

“What I most liked was the very easygoing play of your intelligence into its serious concerns – and your attentive composition, responsive thruout to what the poem was saying in its saying. What means most to me is how at once humorous (alive to the humors of what was going on in the expression – re-creation – of feeling) and personally engaged you keep the poem.”

    Robert Duncan

“These poems of yours are real, brimming with life. The spirit that animates them knows how to dance.”

    Stanley Kunitz

“‘makes real more life than it loses’ Jerry Rothenberg putting it well. ‘Spouts life’ he might have said, thinking of a fountain. A book to value.”

    George Oppen

“For Vas Dias is a modern poet in that he is a craftsman. The impact of his writing comes from that paring down, that edging, which is one mark of the 20th-century poet.”

    Linda W. Wagner

“A truly excellent book of wide-ranging work.”

    Lee Harwood

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Time Exposures
Robert Vas Dias

A pamphlet comprising twelve poems, some of which were previously published in Margin, Oasis, and Stand.

1999 ISBN 1 900996 07 3
Oasis Books, London

“a fine distillation of a mature poetic talent, one that is philosophical, enquiring and conversational.”

    Poetry Quarterly Review

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Inside Outer Space: New Poems of the Space Age
Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Vas Dias

An anthology of poems by 105 American, Canadian, and British poets presenting “different kinds of response to outer space and to space exploration and discovery – the images and terms, the language associated with it, its technology….The space-derived image is the unifying element of these poems; a number utilise the language and terms of astrophysics and astro-engineering, or depend on the information that has become available as a result of space-age science and technology; a few go beyond even this sort of dependency to employ a construct that stems directly from mathematics, statistical probability, and relativity theory.” (From the Introduction)

Among the poets represented are W H Auden, Amiri Baraka, Paul Blackburn, William Bronk, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Theodore Enslin, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Kelly, Stanley Kunitz, Jackson Mac Low, Michael McClure, Charles Olson, George Oppen, Al Purdy, Carl Rakosi, Adrienne Rich, Jerome Rothenberg, Armand Schwerner, Anne Sexton, Gary Snyder, May Swenson, D.M. Thomas, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky.

Cover painting by Allan D’Arcangelo
1970
A Doubleday Anchor Original
Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company

“It's worth reading simply as a poetry anthology, as you're sure to find something that will appeal to you & make you think. But it's also compelling as social & cultural history – if you want to get a real flavor of those times, it's best to ignore the handful of popular clichés that attempt to sum up any era, and go to neglected treasures like this one instead. It might even make you look up at the night skies in wonder again ...”

    Review on amazon.com

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Red Car Blues
Robert Vas Dias

Poem, with original images digitally realised from a photograph by the author, printed on Somerset acid-free paper on a six-colour inkjet using pigmented inks, bound by hand as an accordion-fold book. Produced at Pratt Contemporary Art, Ightham, Sevenoaks, Kent.

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The Guts of Shadows
Robert Vas Dias
Images by John Wright

Sixteen poems by Robert Vas Dias and fourteen images by the British artist John Wright. Each image and facing poem is printed in an individual folder on a six-colour inkjet using pigmented inks on Somerset Velvet Enhanced 255 GSM, each folder gathered and hand-bound in G F Smith Colourplan 350 GSM. Printed and bound by Pratt Contemporary Art, Ightham, Sevenoaks, Kent. Exhibited at the London Artists Book Fair 2003, 2004, 2005.

“It’s a compelling combination of word and image which I only wish we could see more often.”

    Helen Smithson

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A Concise History of Chaos:
Fremontodendron Californicum and the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny
Robert Vas Dias

A Concise History of Chaos is a composition for two voices reflecting the two kinds of text in it: a poem sequence which functions as pictorial description and narrative, and boxes containing informational prose reminiscent of the panels mounted on museum walls ‘explaining’ or giving background information; this voice is reproduced by typographical means to suggest nineteenth-century cards and advertisements and reflects, on the one hand, the eponymous hero of the texts, General John C. Frémont, a colourful explorer, adventurer, botanist, and failed politician and military leader who was associated with America’s expansionist policy of Manifest Destiny, and on the other, the flowering bush Fremontodendron californicum. The writing is otherwise a depiction of a garden in twenty-first century London.

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White on White
Robert Vas Dias
Original print by Ian Tyson

Poem by Robert Vas Dias realised by Ian Tyson with a four-colour original silkscreen print on heavy paper.

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