Release Date: 2024

Publisher: Sandy Press (Santa Barbara / Australia)

Order through Sandy Press at Amazon, Ebay, Barnes and Noble

Price: US$16.48

Pages: 86

Book Description:

Eileen R. Tabios began her “Poems Form/From the Six Directions” partly because she was trying to create a poem in a new way. Creating mixed-media sculptures whose processes engendered verse-poems fit that impetus. But, unexpectedly, the sculpting process made her focus for the first time on working with physical material. As a writer working with imagination and words, she was surprised by the pleasurable frisson of dealing with the tangible as found materials made their way into her mixed-media sculptures. Such materials included old coasters, used magazines, ribbons, recycled cardboard, department store shopping bags, and so on. The sculpting process created a “simmer” in her belly, like the physical effect she often feels when chasing down a poem into written form. She, therefore, decided to try her hand at working more consciously as a visual artist. She hadn’t intended to go this route but allowed herself to follow the impulse because such an “opening” manifested what she considers wonderful about all Art and Poetry: how they lead its maker and viewer/reader into new experiences. She would end up creating about a dozen sculptures before sculpting led her to drawing.

Her drawings and sculptures were just part of Six Directions, a multidisciplinary and interactive project that encompassed several performances, exhibitions, and readings in California’s Bay Area (San Francisco, Berkeley, and Sonoma). Because of her initial  focus on the project’s interactive aspects with audience, the Six Directions drawings are the project’s least known element. This book offers the entire series of drawings, most of which have never been seen in public.

Advance Words:

“In her drawings, Eileen Tabios brings vibrantly colored multiple gourd patterns within diverse geometric ensembles into fruitfully diverse and dynamic compositional arrangements. Sometimes I recall suprematist canvases; at other times, the drawings hark back to the placement of stones in a Japanese garden.”

-Thomas Fink, poet-painter & author of Zeugma

Reader Responses:

The drawings themselves remind me of so many things. They are different from Aboriginal Australian drawings/paintings, but I was strangely reminded of them when I looked at the ones on pages 26-27, which made me think of Roeg’s Walkabout, because of the scale, the implied distances, the shape that looks like a mesa and the blue ones that could be a small pond. To me there’s an implied horizon to these two…

Other drawings make me think of some of the battle maps I used to draw as a younger person… Also the flattened perspective of Plains Indian paintings… some Thangka paintings I saw in Taos once, and some mail-art pieces I’ve received over the years…
—Scott MacLeod, poet & multi-faceted artist (total engagement can be seen HERE)

This book is fantastic! It’s brimming with the always-formidable creative force imbued in all of Eileen Tabios’ books. It’s inspiring me to write and create and only the best of the best writers can cause me to PUT DOWN their book because I feel the need to be creative. Eileen Tabios (especially this book) has this effect on me. I’ve been on a creative streak ever since reading it.
—Heath Brougher, poet, publisher & artist

“amazing and provocative creativity!”
—Phyllis Shaw, painter & scientist