Pictures from an Exhibition

"There were no pictures on the walls of the rented rooms my mother and I lived in when I was a child. But there were pictures on the school walls, details of exhibitions and the lives of great painters inEverybody’s Weekly, and, when we could afford it, we would treat ourselves to a trip to the nearest city and its travelling exhibitions of prints, which was how I saw most of Van Gogh that wasn’t at school.” For Duffy, pictures were and still are magical creations and recreations of the visible world – of history, mythologies, landscape, love and death – where the artists who make them attempt risk-taking feats analogous to a poet’s with words. Pictures abound in this collection, ushering the reader from canvas to screen via x-rays and iPhone snapshots, the latter inspiring the closing sequence ‘Burdsong’. Above all,Pictures from an Exhibition celebrates the mind’s eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship’s hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.