In the summer of 1975, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark broke into Pier 52, an abandoned warehouse on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan. He described the pier as 'an intact nineteenth century industrial relic of steel and corrugated tin looking like an enormous Christian basilica whose dim interior was barely lit by the clerestory windows fifty feet overhead.'

Using hand-held tools, he and his helpers removed some heavy floor beams so the river below was exposed. They made cuts into the walls and roof of the warehouse. In this way movement and light entered the vast space so it became 'a sun and water celebration'. He named this project 'Day's Passing', and then 'Day's End'.

Jane Duran's new book Pier 52 offers a remarkable response to and development of Matta-Clark's aesthetic, inspired by seeing the interdependence of disruption and invention; the radical creation of new spaces in existing constructs; the way removal can alter our perception of a whole structure, animating new vistas and aesthetics; the action of working with what is already there, preserving, recycling and transforming: all are present in his work and words.

Duran's Pier 52 makes new spaces for its readers to think, whether revisiting 1970s Manhattan or noticing the closed spaces of Palestine now.

About the Author
Jane Duran was born in Cuba and raised in the USA and Chile. In 1995, Enitharmon published her first full collection, Breathe Now, Breathe which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Enitharmon also published four subsequent collections, including Coastal (2005) and Graceline (2010) which were both PBS Recommendations. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2005. Together with Gloria Garcia Lorca, she translated Lorca's Gypsy Ballads (Enitharmon, 2011), and his Sonnets of Dark Love and The Tamarit Divan (Enitharmon, 2017). Her collection the clarity of distant things was published by Carcanet in 2021.

Reviews

'Reading this collection is to resensitise our senses of vision and poise. Duran is a guide with the gift of communicating wonder as well as contemplation, starting us off with meditations on the eery spaces - and almost euphoric beams of light - created by much-missed artist Matta-Clark. As the poems proceed so the reader walks from wharf to city block and out and up to trees (where their metaphoric dance is matched by actual contemporary dance). Gradually piers and bridges, the means of connecting us all, give way to something much more sinister: the Israeli walls put up in Palestine. Even here Duran finds joy, moving from the thought-provoking conceptual art of the first half of the book to the warmth of documentary video in the second. She watches with us, evoking the jeopardy and sheer joy of young Palestinians leaping up and onto the architecture which was meant to constrain them. This is a book for our times.'
Richard Price

Book Information
ISBN 9781800175921
Author Jane Duran
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint Carcanet Poetry
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd