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Duncan Hannah 1952-2022

  I first met Duncan Hannah  at one of the Century Association lunches for fabs of the novels of Anthony Powell organized by Bill Warren in the 2000s. Hannah   was introduced to me, by Bill Warren or Bill’s wife Arete, as a painter knowledgeable about Powell’s era and a fan of Powell’s works. I never knew him really well, but we had several conversations at these events and I got on the invitation list for his art shows, of which I attended a few, one of them, memorably, in the company of Jonathan Kooperstein. When I first talked to Duncan , we spoke of Henry Lamb and Rodrigo Moynihan, two painters for whom Powell sat in very different phases of his life. To hear of his death in mid-June 2022 was a shock, because he was somebody who was not yet old and look much younger than he was. Indeed, when his diaries (officially “Notebooks”) were published under the title Twentieth Century Boy in 2018, I could’ve see the title as not just retrospective but, the century notwithstanding, current.

Mark Statman’s Hechizo

  Mark Statman,  Hechizo,  Dialogos Books, 20220, ISBN 978-1-944884-96-3.      In   his previous  collection ,  Exile Home .  Statman rode the stimulus of  the  landscape in Oaxaca and an enhanced  intimacy with the  Spanish  language to create  an elegant, subtle, and lyrical poetic  mode .  (   Statman  easily could have mined this  mode  for three or four books, made this more refined, Stevensian posture the f r ame of  the  latter part of his   oeuvre. Instead,  Hechizo  goes in the opposite direction:  jagged,  unfettered,  letting its art stem from the soul.  A n   incantation ,  but in a speech more excitable than gaudy. ( “Mexican songs” begins with the  poet  saying that their “sound  sometime s/holy  sacred  to me/ like/synagogue prayers/ from when I was young.” But the sacredness becomes more than  merely  incidental: “despair softness our condition/ that’s our turning to song/ so that we in love/lost love / abandoned   lo v e/our tears/can say at night at/dawn we wink the s