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Lay for the Day
25th April

1874: the Parisian satirical paper Charivari reviews a co-operative exhibition organised by the Anonymous Society of Artists. The reviewer, Louis Leroy, scoffs at the work, making particular mock of a picture by Claude Monet called Impression: Sunrise. The article, headlined “Exposition des impressionnistes”, gave a name to the most popular painting style of the modern era. As well as Monet, the exhibition showed most of the major figures of Impressionism, including Cézanne, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley.
 
London impressions:

 

Sleepless

Sleepless in his globe, the goldfish blinks
a doleful mouth, incessant, startled,
orange paint rubbing off his tinfoil sides.
Look out the window – rain starts up,
riddling the headlights, the streets seem submerged
and the houses broken moles where enlarged
eyes are drawn to stare through the glass, subject
to that cloud-wracked yellow moon.

But on finer nights you can breathe freely.
The streetlights of the city infiltrate
the sky like a dust, raddling its lilac,
and the back-garden trees are stilled under
a lick of warm light framed by the window.
He circulates clear water, nosing weed,
swivelling, flushing his gills.


John Gibbens
from Pisces
 

The Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar



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