A Review of Amanda Earl’s Genesis by Katy Wimhurst
Art has a long history of engagement with the Bible. Amanda Earl’s Genesis (Timglaset Press, 2022), a book of visual poems, is a breathtaking and original contribution to this. Genesis is the first part of Earl’s Vispo Bible, her life’s work to translate every book, chapter, and verse of the Bible into visual poetry. Sections of her Vispo Bible have previously been published as chapbooks and broadsides, in anthologies, and online. This is the first book.
There are fifty black and white visual poems in Genesis, each based on one chapter of the first book of the Bible. Many have a feathery, Mandala-like structure. They are like fireworks made of dark lace, or how Bridget Riley-style Op Art might appear if based on the structure of snowflakes and peppered with cosmology. Some pieces are more gossamer, others more ominous and pulsing with kinetic power.
The impressive visual poems are all produced digitally. Earl copies the chapter text from BibleGateway.com into either Photoshop or Illustrator, and she then uses the techniques for photo and design manipulation on it. In some pieces, traces of the original text can be discerned; in others, it has been obliterated into a line.
Earl has said that her Vispo Bible is marked by an irreverence to its words as well as ‘a defiant feminist repurposing of the Bible in response to misogyny and homophobia’; but she admits, too, a life-long fascination with the Bible and its literary offshoots. Genesis is thus a consciously critical as well as creative engagement with the Christian text.
‘In the beginning was the word’, says the Bible. However, perhaps the true genesis is what Earl does here—that is, to ‘explode the words and messages of the Bible in… exquisite lingual eruptions… cosmic interruptions of bilious ideology’ (Gregory Betts).
I cannot recommend this book highly enough, both as a stunning series of visual poems and as an ingenious way of reconfiguring Christian ideas.