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The Head Of The Hatra Apollo
Author/s: Peter Spagnuolo and C.K.Wilde
Edition: 12
Year: 2004
Price: SOLD
This book features letterpressed text and Intaglio illustration on Indian Khadi Paper, with Mexican Amate endsheets. The type was set by Mark Wagner in Greek Ornato and Grotesque Condensed and printed on the Vandercook SP15 by the window, looking out at the east river and the glittering city lights. The drypoint etchings were printed at Pratt with the assistence of Caitlin "Cat" Glennon. Wax frottage, collage, and acrylic and walnut ink aspiration complete the page activations suite utlized in the production. The publisher bound the text onto vellum tapes, with washi and tarlaten reninforcements. The casing boards have "drummed" burlap wrapped over copper paper wrapped Davey boards.
Peter wrote the sonnet shortly after the beheadings started occuring in Iraq. An intense sense of hopelessness set in after reading of 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians, Margaret Hassan's murder, and the Sites videotaping of a Marine shooting an unarmed,wounded Iraqi man in a Mosque- all in one week. All this violence, and silence the response. Save for Peter's poem ringing in the mind's ear. The rich and musical images cascadeing through the text found resonance within the illustrative lobe of the publishers head. The resultant twelve books, with three artists proofs, are dedicated to the victims of violence in Iraq.
The Head Of The Hatra Apollo
-missing from the Iraqi National Museum, Baghdad, April 2003
No light can gild the sun-god's cheek but strains through burlap now,
Phoibos the refugee, his head a marble cabbage in a sack,
Jouncing east by pickup down a dirt track,
Across Seleucid wastes, the Parthian plains,
once more fortune's tourist, bobbing free.
Or not-
Just stashed behind a rubbish mound
Where bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal,
Scant miles from the museum's shattered room
Stripped of laurel and oracles,
his loom of sacred strings,
No Horai here spin round,
Just pacing men who wait to close the deal.
A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov,
The godhead mute since looters hacked it off.
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