ANAMORPHOSIS OF EVE: A POEM CREATED IN SERIGRAPHY

Wordscomposed by F.B. Cornell '31. Visualizationdesigned and produced by Joseph D'Ambrosio.Chicago: Limited Edition of 200copies, set in 12-point Americana type andhandprinted on Japan mulberry, GermanBasingwerk, and Strathmore cotten [sic]papers, numbered and signed by the authorand the artist. $35.

This is an esoteric, cynical, and colorful work. Fourteen pages of text with drawings and nine full pages of illustrations on white paper, mulberry, light green, and orange, with provocative inlays and overlays, the poem is what one might expect of Frank Cornell.

Esoteric: Cornell and D'Ambrosio play with anamorphosis, a method that gives a distorted image of Eve when she is viewed directly but a natural image when viewed from a certain point and reflected in a curved mirror. Serigraphy is the art of making color prints by the silk screen process and printed by the artist himself, who is cleverly ingenious in deflecting images.

Thus, far removed from Milton's, Cornell's Eve in Cornell's Lost Paradise is described no fewer than eight times in variegated sitting positions: "flowerlike after a heated bloom has withered," "in stifling Byzantine gloom," "within the embalmment of the dark," "drowsing; nodding in suffocated light," amid "the myriad unguents of her toilet. ..."

She is Helen "grown querulous." Cleopatra, spayed and stale, but "viciously amorous." Aphrodite with "wrinkled dugs wrapped in pale peignoirs." Minerva "with snaky ringlets" ... "beneath the shambles of a wild red wig." "Of ancient unsatiated hate," Astarte, the Pheonician deity of sexuality, fertility, maternity, and war. "By a vulgar populace adorned," Isis, the Greek rainbow goddess who restored the peace of nature. Kali about whom "maiden and brides . . . writhe in festive rituals of Durga Purga."

And so, enmeshed in "necromancy" and "in purple depths of mysterious quiet," Eve continues to sit with a skinny palm supporting her quivering chin. Trembling with a tic, the other hand clenches a monstrous emerald ring,

"which blinks a fixed and glittering eye in the manner of an angry serpent determinedly searching." For what? Presumably for what that jewel is reputed to give: success in love, revelation of future events, and ultimate truth, all denied to Eve, and with good reason. Dwelling in "unfresh air" throughout the centuries she celebrates her immortality in "unceasing volup. tuousness of her never-for-a-moment in. terrupted self-concern."