{"product_id":"promesse-du-bonheur-9781941701430","title":"Promesse du Bonheur","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMichael Fried is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and luminaries of the art world have resulted in a canonised body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, \u003cem\u003ePromesse du Bonheur\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFried's passion, lyricism, and humour, which have been lauded by Allen Grossman and J.M. Coetzee, are on display as he explores the people and the objects that have moved him—great minds and great works of art.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAlong the way, Fried begins to reveal himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself; a young man, ambitious and in love; a committed champion of artists; a world-class intellectual among intellectual peers; and a poet, transmuting the world around him. Here we find the poet-critic at his most complete.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBeyond presenting new works, \u003cem\u003ePromesse du Bonheur\u003c\/em\u003e breaks ground for Fried by combining eighty poems, a mix of lyric and prose poems, with thirty-three photographs, most of them made, all of them chosen by renowned American photographer James Welling.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe photographs throughout often stand in oblique relation to the poems and must be interpreted in their own right, as images and as complementary pieces of this mesmerising whole. Written under the epigraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson's urging in \"Self-Reliance\"—\"Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events\"—the poems engage diverse subjects: from the high modernist art world of the 1960s to a major poet's tragic loss of memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom exemplary works and persons such as Degas' \u003cem\u003eThe Fallen Jockey\u003c\/em\u003e, Kleist's \u003cem\u003ePrince of Homburg\u003c\/em\u003e, Menzel's drawings, Edouard Manet, Anna Akhmatova, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Ian Hamilton, and John Harbison, to erotic love, late fatherhood, the death of parents and friends, and the onset of age.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePromesse du Bonheur\u003c\/em\u003e is a uniquely vivid and compelling volume, at once a collection of wide-ranging yet intimately related poems and a brilliant photobook, that aims to hold the reader\/viewer in its spell from first page to last.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Thames and Hudson (Australia) Pty Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47432032157932,"sku":"9781941701430","price":43.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781941701430.jpg?v=1774556921","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/promesse-du-bonheur-9781941701430","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}