Missing one print, "ballad," a poem dealing with the theme of sailors. Includes a poem entitled "Homage to Malevich" in which a square is made up of the words black and block printed with a bold black typeface. This poem has been critically analyzed by Stephen Scobie (Earthquakes& Explorations, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997, hard cover book, pp 182-189) as pivotal to the understanding of Finlay's work. "The letter to Garnier indicates also the extent to which Finlay's aesthetic was formed by the artistic movements of the early twentieth century; its reference points are Cubism, Fauvism, and Suprematism. The recourse to painting arose, the letter explains, at the point where verbal language in itself seemed inadequate: 'with the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense that the syntax I had been using, the movement of language in me, at a physical level, was no longer there.' Painting - or, more generally, 'visual language' - provided (for Finlay, and for many other poets at the time) a way out of this impasse: not by discarding words, but by supplementing them. The 'movement' of language became a visual movement, because poetry is already implicated in images, and painting is already a linguistic structure. Thus, Cubism was a particularly apt model for Finlay, since it is exemplary among modem movements for its self-consciously semiotic character. The distinguishing point of Concrete Poetry has always been its relation to syntax. In ordinary language, and thus in conventional poetry, it is syntax that provides the connectives, that ties one word to the next and advances the reader in a linear manner through the poem. Poetry has often utilized other schemes of connection (rhyme and metre; meta-phor and image-pattem) that run counter or across the linear progression of syntax; poetry, in other words, has always aspired towards a spatial form that will inhibit its progression in time. But only Concrete Poetry has succeeded in establishing convincing alternatives to syntax. It is at this point also that the possible analogy between Concrete Poetry and Cubism becomes most suggestive, in terms of an analogy between linear syntax in poetry and linear perspective in painting." Those movements in modem painting that abandoned figuration altogether also, by definition, abandoned perspective; other movements, like Impressionism and Fauvism, came to uneasy compromises, in which elements of traditional perspective survive, as it were, squashed up to the surface. Only Cubism succeeded in establishing a means of organizing representational pictorial space that was a fully coherent alternative to per-spective. In the same way, Concrete Poetry reorganized poetic space in non-syntactic ways without abandoning referential language. Even those concrete poems that retain a syntactical element usually subordinate that element to the visual design of the poem. That is, the way in which one reads a concrete poem, the connections one makes between its different components, and the conclusions one draws from these connections are all determined visually, not by a discursive move-ment of linear syntax. Take as an example (and it relates directly to the Garnier letter) Finlay's Homage to Malevich. This poem retains, obviously, a high degree of semantic content, in the meanings and associations attached to the words 'black/ 'block,' 'lack/ and 'lock.' But the relationships between these meanings are suggested not by syntactic means but by visual ones: the fact that the words form a black block which is locked together; or that 'lock' and 'lack' are formed by the lack of the b, which runs down the right-hand edge, lacking its completion; or that the insistence on black in this square (and in Malevich's) suggests the lack of white, or the locked-in binary of black and white; and so forth. The reference to Malevich, and to his famous Suprematist painting of the black square, places this verbal construct within a pictorial context. As with the later Emblems, the visual image calls for the supplement of commentary. And as so often in Finlay's work, it is Stephen Bann who provides it: Here it is a question of the equivocal status of the edge, the bordering limit which both separates language formally from the surrounding 'blank' space and also (as it were) bisects the semantic units 'black' and 'block,' leaving an oscillation of the resolved and the unresolved in the terms 'lack' and 'lock.' Finlay expresses a tension that will prove crucial to his further development as an artist: that of form and non-form, language and non-language, being set not merely in opposition, but in a dialectical relationship. If Malevich, in his 'Square' series, achieves dialectical expression of the painter's problem of figure and ground, Finlay carefully avoids the implication that such a problem can simply be transposed into poetic terms. For language is in itself presence and absence, in terms of Saussure's distinction it comprises both signifter and signified. In 'Homage to Malevich,' the space 'of doubt' is not simply the white page, but the dimension of meaning whose incompatible signs (lack/lock) are in contrast with the certainty of typographic structure. So the Homage to Malevich too is a 'model of order': not only in its typographic fixity, and not only in its evocation of the formal ideals of Suprematism, but also in its adherence to the generic conventions of the hommage. In a 'homage/ one artist brings his or her own sensibility to bear upon another's; the result is a statement about each artist individu-ally, and also about the way they relate to each other in the continuity of culture. The homage is paid, indeed, not just to the artist named but to that very continuity; the homage asserts the continued vitality of the past, at the same time as it marks a certain distance from it. just as Finlay's tributes to Robespierre and Saint-Just contain an elegiac element, an implicit statement of loss, so too the Homage to Malevich locks into the present the lack of Malevich's presence." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.