The Clarity of Distant Things

Jane Duran’s The Clarity of Distant Things brings together two discrete projects. The first engages the paintings of abstract expressionist Agnes Martin. The second recounts the centuries-long history of Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula. Why bring these two studies together? 

The most obvious connection is Duran’s preoccupation with ekphrasis. Reflecting on Martin’s minimalist grid paintings, the poet conjures entire landscapes: 

in late afternoon
the rooftops elide

so many golden windows 
bricks, dockside warehouses 

artists’ river-lofts

Duran peppers her interpretations with brief details from Martin’s life, but overall these are quiet poems of intense visual concentration that attempt to access the paintings’ deepest recesses. 

In the second section, the poet retains her visual focus, this time with cinematic snapshots that evoke adventure with remarkable economy: 

red and white fish 
nose the hull 

an old man is at the tiller
and a child tightens the sail.

Here, Duran’s meditation on works of art―including illuminated manuscripts, ceramics, and other artifacts from Muslim Iberia―takes into account broader histories, especially of conquest and scientific advancement, as in this description of the astrolabe:

[…] 5 discs of the earth 
the sheen of 5 latitudes 

5 meridians
and local horizons

earth you can touch 
your forehead to, your lips to

In moments such as these, it becomes evident that the book’s two projects are both focused on frontiers of the visible, literal and figurative horizons. The astrolabe was tuned to the stars, but so is Martin’s “Falling Blue 1963,” as Duran describes it: “the blue and gold lines / are so closely packed // and uneven, they hum― / such night, such reckoning.” The unifying force in this book is Duran’s own experience of the objects of her study, both of which she sees as leaving lasting marks on the world: “It is the idea of staying, a grant of earth // the earth I interrupt now with my hands.”