Astrophil and Stella

Author: Sean Bonney

Publisher: Veer Books (2024)

"Astrophil and Stella was published by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum press in 1999. Bonney had been attending the WF workshop for some time and had been impressed by Cobbing’s various energies. His later statement that he 'loved the way he would focus on the text as material, would blow up the words till they fell apart, become simply marks on the page . . .' illuminates this collection. Here the passionate frustrations of Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence are translated into feverishly-worked grids of improvised spattered charcoal markings. Bonney later moved to a more explicitly revolutionary rhetoric; this text—along with Baudelaire in English (Veer 012)— witnesses a strikingly original response to Cobbing’s practice."

—Adrian Clarke