Gypsies of the Unattainable

<p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Prelude </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>A selection of Rolleiflex prints of our New Purgatory...</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> wrote C.P. Byron of his labyrinthine modern epic</span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Gypsies of the Unattainable</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. Noting a remark made more than 100 years ago in Ezra Pound's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Spirit of Romance</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> that all ages are contemporaneous </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Gypsies presents Purgatory not as myth but as the streets we walk each day of our lives. The poems portray irrevocable decisions made flesh the irreducible sums of all our choices Byron concluded. </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The wandering poet's records of such summing up are</span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> evident throughout his long and varied Paris cycle. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>    While with broad updated Homeric and Dantean references in structure and in progression the cycle's prime influence must be attributed to Ovid's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>ethopoeia </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>rendered by Byron as personal and intimate character sketches.</span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>It is his use of character portraiture that carries weight and conveys meaning in each of these poems. Even the most prominent missing character the artist himself appears as in Vermeer's masterpieces of </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>camera obscura</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. In </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Gypsies</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> the poet presents and explores his vast and varied cast by allowing us to see them in their most profound intimacies - sometimes shocking occasionally banal - until we all but inhabit their circles of acquaintances. Often we admire them; occasionally we are embarrassed for them; sometimes we are horrified by them until all of responses dissipates into the heady air of the human the humane and the inhumane. So are readers ushered into the New Purgatory of modern European life as seen through the eyes and heard in the voices of expatriates past and present a full century after Gertrude Stein's infamous Lost Generation drank loved and grieved their way across the continent. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Through its nine sections and posthumous poems spanning Europe America South America and Asia </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Gypsies </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>ferries travelers on a time-unbound odyssey in search of emotional richness intellectual precision and spiritual meaning - descent transcendence and transfiguration. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>    In C.P. Byron's perpetual now with countless introductions to people and persona both startling and mundane </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Gypsies of the Unattainable builds to </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>become poetic fiction truer than true life as is every human life including one's own.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p>