White Cloud Over Purple
WHITE CLOUD OVER PURPLE is an ekphrastic “feast of forms” – poetry that takes inspiration from works of art, literature, music and film. Featuring Mark Rothko, William S. Burroughs, Sappho, Hilma af Klint, Derek Jarman, Claude Cahun, John Cage, Bonnie Tyler (and many more!)
Published by Atomic Bohemian on 30th August 2024 and OUT NOW!
ONLINE BOOK LAUNCH – TUESDAY 10TH SEPTEMBER
Featuring Special Guests Wendy Allen, Briony Collins, Damien Donnelly and Mark Antony Owen, this is now available to watch on my YouTube channel.
Praise for White Cloud Over Purple
“With this feast of forms, JP Seabright sets before us a banquet of delicacies it would be uncultured (and unwise) to devour in a single sitting. Fresh twists await at every turn – this is more than just ‘after’ and ekphrastic poetry, no matter how deeply its roots reach down into literature, music, art and more. We find Bonnie Tyler sharing space with Virginia Woolf; Hieronymus Bosch between the same covers as Ian Dury. There’s a cento so rich in sources it takes nearly two pages to quote every poet and poem it borrows from. Indeed, the many back stories, nuances and inspirations are as nourishing as the poems themselves: you’ll want to read then refer yourself to the end notes endlessly. White Cloud Over Purple is a remarkable collection. A bookmarkable one, too.”
Mark Antony Owen, creator and curator of iamb and After…
“To cram everything into this small space appears to serve a disservice to the poetry of JP Seabright. Here in White Cloud Over Purple, poems appear as a physical body of work, shapeshifting through form, in homage to artists, composers and writers such as Virginia Woolf and John Cage, but the celebration is ultimately of another self: metaphysical and other, and scientist, artist and poet, at once. Seabright is a poet whose work impresses with complex approaches to form and aesthetic, but always with an intimate touch, breath, or word placed strategically to make you gasp.”
Wendy Allen, author of Plastic Tubed Little Bird (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), and Portrait in Mustard (forthcoming Seren Books, 2024).
“In White Cloud Over Purple, poet becomes commentator, critic, recreator and, perhaps most importantly, scientist giving us a collection of solenoids where words are electrons, poems are helical paths and we, the readers, are drawn to its magnetism. A lyrical breakdown through form, fracture and reformation into something other, somethingmorethanitwas. Fragments of splintered geniuses from Bausch and Bosch, Elliot, Orwell, Plath, Kandinsky and Kubrick, Rothko, Zeppelin and Hendrix are rearranged in time and space and across the page. Seabright, with a mastery of craft and a deft combination of cubism, eroticism, humour, hurt and scientific observation, offers us a sum of the whole that doesn’t tell us what it is but instead, asks us to ask ourselves. This is, indeed, a triumph of primary (colours) collaborations from an artist never afraid of questioning their own form. And we are all the better for it.“
Damien Donnelly, EIC of The Storms, podcaster and author of Enough! and Back From Away
White Cloud Over Purple Playlist!
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JP Seabright 