M.emoire (2014)

2014 Selection

Designed by Clare Lynch (Design) (Freelance)

Publisher: Duras Press

Artist / Cover Painting: Huib Fens

Categories: Printed Publication / Print

Industry: Cultural

M.emoire is a highly personal collection of prose and poetry written as a tribute to the author's late wife Margaret (M). The book is divided into three sections of poetry, followed by the prose which also contains a French translation.

The three sections of poems serve as markers from the years before M's death from cancer... diagnosis, failing health and finally grief. While the prose section is a series of letters from the widower to his wife after her passing. Here, the process of death has passed and M is remembered without illness.

The author describes their 42 years together as a marriage with 6 lives... "Every 7 years it changed. But there wasn't to be a seventh — growing old together — to complete the cycle." The book's grid and much of its detailing is based on this idea of numbers, sequence and something missing. The slipcase reveals the cover from the one seventh missing, page numbers feature on one side only, beneath the dust jacket the title is blind embossed. Symbols rather than numbers are used to mark sections. Semi-transparent end papers bring the reader in and out of the text.

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88pp Text and 8pp dust-jacket plus a blind-embossed cover on Arcoprint Milk with 180gsm Translucent Vellum end papers.