the Fool and Physician

Exploding with Carnivalesque and antic energy, The Fool and the Physician shows the formal range and wit of Andy Brown's poetry, from traditional lyric forms such as pantoums, sonnets and ballads, to paradelles, prayers, prose poems, and many playful devices inspired by the authors of the OuLiPo. The poems center on the figure of the Clown and the Fool, exploring the meanings and associations attached to these characters. In part one, clowns career into space, up to heaven, knock at our front doors and expound upon the end of the world. The second half of the book is based on some of the remarkable paintings of Hieronymus Bosch - from direct responses to his works, to personal poems, or the more tangential approaches such as the densely erotic Garden of Earthly Delights - playing off Bosch's extraordinary representations of fools and visions of human folly.