Fourth and Walnut

Equal parts commonplace book, instruction manual and cheerful vandalism, Fourth & Walnut is absurdly joyful, gathering together words from a wide range of favourite writers and artists, erasing some and fooling with others as variations on themes and tunes are tried out.

‘Advice to a Young Poet’ opens happily with the news that Rilke can be ignored. ‘Equinox in a Box’ records a day spent gazing upwards in a James Turrell skyspace while the mind remembers, dreams and wanders out of the box.

Interludes on love and death deviate into a sequence promising an essay on reading and unpredictability, which is in turn distracted by counting snowdrops, shellacking cardboard boxes and the urge to take flight.

The book ends with an erasure of an Edwardian book for children on the ‘art of seeing’, revealing alternative vistas by looking within, and teasing, the language.

Beyond the whimsy, what the book seeks are the precise coordinates of heaven which Thomas Merton found in Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. The search is, we learn, a kaleidoscopic and playful process of collage, digression and invention. Or, as Over puts it –

‘You have to look away

and then back a few minutes later

to notice the colour changes.’