Description
Pennies on My Eyes is a centennial collection of Wilfred Owen’s poetry illustrated by Reading-based artists. The town made its contribution to Owen’s becoming a poet through the encouragement he received from Professor Edith Morley at the University of Reading while based in the nearby village of Dunsden. Each inspired by a work in this memorial volume, the artists offer their unique responses for this celebratory gathering of Owen’s most famous war poems, published on 4 November 2018, the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death on the Western Front at the Sambre-Oise Canal just one week before the Armistice.
Includes artworks from: Ahmad Alazami, Martin Andrews, Sally Castle, Terry Cree, Nadja Guggi, Jenny Halstead, Jennifer Leach, Geoff Sawers.
“demonstrates how Owen’s poems continue to inspire the work of other artists, here those who create in images rather than words. In this volume’s pages we see everything from disquiet at patriotic rhetoric and enlistment enthusiasm (‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘The Send-Off’); comradeship and harrowing battle (‘Exposure’, ‘The Show’, and ‘Spring Offensive’); the living hell of physical and psychological wounds (‘Disabled’, ‘Mental Cases’); to death, ghosts, and descents into the underworld (‘Asleep’, ‘Strange Meeting’). Pennies on my Eyes, with its contributions by local artists from Reading, a town that was central to Owen’s literary and personal development… vividly shows that despite being rooted in the cataclysm of 1914–1918, Owen’s themes transcend his own historical period.” — Jane Potter, from the Afterword
For more information on Wilfred Owen and his time in Dunsden, visit the Dunsden Owen Association.
Wilfred Owen. Paperback, 216 x 138 mm, 56 pages, November 2018.
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