Bleed and See is an elegy for Chris Laoutaris’ brother, George Laoutaris, whose premature death is grasped so close in the poet’s hands, it passes with the beauty of the last of the summer roses. Chris Laoutaris quotes from an army of rich sources, from Desiderius Erasmus to Denise Levertov, with the inner strength to match them: “wisdom acquired through suffering is a kind of gift”. Bleed and See is an otherworldly, moon-drenched collection which, like the best elegies, leaves us changed.
| Original language | English |
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| Publisher | Broken Sleep Books |
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| Number of pages | 170 |
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| ISBN (Print) | 9781915079909 |
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| Publication status | Published - 31 Oct 2022 |
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'Bleed and See' functions as a piece of concentrated research because it is highly intertextual, featuring epigram-quotes from numerous historical and literary works, as well as references to artworks, exhibitions, folk customs and traditions. These function as spurs for many of the poems (demonstrating that the poems are based on historical, literary, archaeological, art-historical and anthropological research). The book also includes a substantial bibliography (for a poetry collection). What makes this a highly researched piece is the addition of a 41-page reflective introductory essay entitled 'Refiguring Disfigurement and Disability: An Essay on Critical Poetics', which both analyses the poetry within the collection and situates it within critical disability discourse, using appropriate references to primary and historical sources relating to this field (all of which are clearly referenced). The essay also explores and highlights the gaps in the field and how to plug them, by suggesting a new kind of creative-critical praxis which focuses on a 'poetics of caring'. The collection therefore engages directly with critical disability and caring theories, surveys those allied fields, and makes recommendations for new forms of critical-creative praxis which build on the collection itself as a case study for this. The critical, historical and literary research therefore complements the creative writing elements of the book. As a poetry collection, therefore, this is unusually dense in research, both in terms of its introductory critical-reflective apparatus and in relation to the intertextual, and inter-material, nature of its poems. It also includes original artworks by the book's subject (my brother, George), which take their place among the many artworks (both material and literary) with which the volume engages. In addition, the volume reflects on how research conducted for my other books, such as my monograph 'Shakespearean Maternities', has fed into new kinds of creative reflection presented in the collection's poems.