to be published 23 March 2021 by Revelore Press

Marshall McLuhan wrote about the Media in a poetic style, preferring aphorism and metaphoric relations to the bleary-eyed recitation of more conventional media scholars.  His style frustrated far more than it delighted in academe, but the passage of time has increasingly confirmed his enormously pathbreaking contribution to understanding media.   His grandson Andrew writes poetry about media and other aspects of life on Earth in his new book, his first book, Written Matter.  My guess is it will delight lovers of the written word and seekers of truth about our complex existence.

The book begins with eight short poems (all the poems in this volume are short) that start with the media and "the flow of ink, the slow of think" and "when a pen fails, a pencil sails," and returns to media later in the book "where words lay waste ruin".  But my favorite poems in this little volume are about nature, as in "the fall softness becomes brittle" and about human life, as in "there I tread where tears tear time".

Half the book are photos taken by Andrew that in one way or another complement the poems on the left-hand side, so we're talking about a total of 28 poems in this volume.  I read them in about 20 minutes, but I expect to return to them often in the years ahead.

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