I. Hall of Mirrors, 1964 (1)

It's a rare holiday Monday here, for Labor Day. We were looking forward to a cool early autumn weekend during which we'd be motivated to do all kinds of things we've been neglecting, but instead it just goes on being insufferably hot. We did manage to go on a gentle hike in Bradbury Mountain State Park on Saturday morning, though. It was cool amongst the trees.

To return to the John Burnside poem from last week, I. Hall of Mirrors, 1964, some first thoughts.

The title sounds like a title you'd read at an exhibition of photography - I suppose I'm thinking of one particular exhibition I saw a few years ago of a series by a photographer focusing on travelling carnival workers, where the illusion and excitement of carnival (little seen in the photographs, if I remember rightly) is contrasted with the not exactly sordid, but at least mundane or slightly wretched lives of those whose job is to create it. I'm also thinking of a more general impression of a photographic style from the 1960s or 1970s (I know almost nothing of photography, so this is more my own impression from exhibitions I've stumbled on over the years) of a kind of staged social documentary, focused on marginal or at least ex-centric human subjects in their particular environment, given further odd flavour by the use of lighting and shade, saturated colours contrasting with faded surrounds. I can imagine this poem easily as such a photograph - a moment that captures a mother and a young boy in the hall of mirrors at a small-town fair just as they both turn and catch sight of the boy's distorted reflection, with the colours of the mother's striking dress reflected in the mirrors around them. The pale colours of the "famille-verte and powdered-citrus light-bulbs" give the counterpoint to the saturated dress colours - "antique green and crimson" - also contrasted against the off-white of the material of the dress itself - as does the "verdigris and tallow" (corroded copper lamps of hidden passageways?) of the "backrooms of the heart" in the later stanza.

I have, as ever, run out of day and weekend.