![[Your basket]](images/basket_small.gif "Your basket"){kind=small}
Your basket
The Caprices
by James Byrne
The Caprices is a sequence of poems written in response to Goya's Los Caprichos, a series of aquatints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Each of the 80 poems is illustrated by the etching to which it responds, and shares its title. As James Byrne writes in his introduction: "Goya's Los Caprichos are a series of real-life nightmares that haunt the twenty-first century. [...] Arguably, the world we live in today is more terrifying than Goya's Spain because — in over two hundred years since he created Los Caprichos — we have become more cool about human inhumanity. The echo grows louder, the world becomes more absurd, more criminal and yet, perversely, our collective response all too often verges on the whimsical. Goya, echoing in his deafness, hears our own, capturing all these elements variously throughout his masterwork."
These poems make up a series of strangely
courageous encounters between James Byrne
and each one of Goya’s Capricio etchings. Byrne
allows something like a process of osmosis to
take place between the visual and the verbal
forms and between the parallel darkness,
violence and unreason that pervades our
modern times and the darkness, violence and
unreason that surrounded Goya during the
final years of the eighteenth century.
A collaboration, an illuminated text, a setting
of Goya to music. Byrne’s The Caprices is a very
rich experience to read alongside the original
Caprichos images. One is particularly struck
by how on the pulse both the images and
poems are, individually, but also revealing a
third entity which is the images and poems
together. This poetic response is a tour de force
within the constraints of form and yet it moves
with a mercury dash.
Pbk: 9781911469858
Hbk: 9781911469865
Published October 2019
