Description
Carefully chosen words, combined with sensitive economy, create powerful images which excite and inspire, imprinting themselves on our imagination and creating new experiences to be sealed in memory: these pieces of writing might be described as “picture perfect”. “My imagination is pictorial”, Richard Davenport-Hines writes in his preface, and the works he has chosen for this compilation have been selected for their ability to “create lively, inspiriting and sometimes unforgettable images in my mind.”
Anthony Eyre –
Richard Davenport-Hines writes:
The spirit of my anthology is contained in a remark of I A Richards: ‘A decline in our sensitiveness and discrimination with words must be followed soon by a decline in the quality of our living also.’ How good it is to see the word ‘discrimination’ used in a positive sense rather than by grievance-mongering campaigners. The anthology… celebrates the life-enhancing and discriminate use of words. Everything in it, whether poetry, prose, maxim or deathbed gasp, gains in its meaning by being read aloud. My imagination is pictorial. I remember rooms and landscapes more keenly than emotions. For that reason, the book is entitled Picture Perfect.