Brennan and Santos–Light and Shade

Light and Shade
by Gerry Brennan and Mariana Santos

ISBN-13: 978-0692508244
ISBN-10: 0692508244
98 pages
$13.00

This collection of poems and drawings will interest those who love both poetry and the visual arts, as Brennan’s poems discuss history, philosophy, and human culture with Santos’ artwork. According the critic Nuno Miguel Guedes,

‘Light and Shade goes from the particular to the general. From the soul to the eye. You will say: isn’t this what poetry is all about? And you will be right. But it’s the look that counts for its uniqueness, forming and transforming reality.
Sometimes the words of Gerry Brennan seem to come form some sweet haze of a drunken hour, mixing improbable meetings, making silent eulogies for singers and musicians which mean much more than their work. But suddenly he can become angry, about the crimes that human misery has perpetrated. Or glad that in such a darker place we can still find glances of epic heroism in every day life.
There are historic tragedies, there is a simple complexity that all his words can capture. Strange paradoxes: the horrible that can build beauty, the innocence that nurtures crime, the life that announces death.
But in the end, a strange and mysterious candour, a beckettian laugh, a desperate optimism’

Ghosts Fantasmas

Ghosts

Ghosts
explain their presence
by reference
to a past
that is proven,
nailed in time.
A fixed point
immutable
for eternity.
Never to be
products
of evolution.

–Gerry Brennan and Mariana Santos

Light and Shade