Description
Title: The Founders’ Gift, impressions from a collection
Author: Robert Fraser, b. 1947
Shrouded in winter light, a frost-bitten painter breathes on his finger-tips to stir them into life. In a debtors’ prison in London, two sisters whisper of shame, exclusion and disgrace. A dog barks at a press-gang. Bound for a cathedral city, some storm-tossed travellers bicker about the meaning
of existence. Obliquely, sometimes surprisingly, this sequence of poems explores thirty-two of the pictures, including Edwin Long’s The Babylonian Marriage Market (1875), donated by the philanthropist Thomas Holloway (1800-83), to the college he endowed in memory of his wife, Jane (1814-1875).
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