Matter & Memory is an extraordinary collection of poems, originally produced as pamphlets and given to family and friends, recording the poet’s wide interests in popular culture, religion, politics, philosophy and art.
Beginning with poems that explore the ‘fascination of glamour and image, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ in the 1970s, they record his later involvement in the Orthodox church and his understanding of prayer, death and eternity. Along the way we encounter Albert Gleizes, Heidegger, Bob Dylan, Blake, Yeats (especially, Yeats), Ernest Bevin and Geraldine McNeill, ‘the dentist in Cushendun, who was also a rather extraordinary painter’.
Matter & Memory is the result of a lifetime’s contemplation of what it means to be human.
Peter Brooke was born in 1948 in Belfast where he was active in left-wing politics and the Gay rights movement. He was the author of Ulster Presbyterianism: The Historical Perspective 1610–1970 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987). He had a life-long interest in the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes and his circle and was the author of Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001), the first major biography in English of the artist, and explored his writings in a series of books, including a translation of Art and Religion, Art and Science, Art and Production (Francis Boutle, 1999). He was baptised in the Orthodox church. He died in 2024.
