After Cézanne

Maitreyabandhu was born Ian Johnson in 1961, in Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire. His parents ran a coach firm on the High Street. Initially trained as a nurse at the Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry, he went on to study fine art at Goldsmiths College, London, alongside Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. He started attending classes at the London Buddhist Centre (LBC) in 1986, and moved into a residential community above the LBC in 1987. He was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1990 and given the name Maitreyabandhu. Since then he has lived and worked at the LBC, teaching Buddhism and meditation. He has written three books on Buddhism, Thicker than Blood: Friendship on the Buddhist Path (2001), Life with Full Attention: a Practical Course in Mindfulness (2009) and The Journey and the Guide, all from Windhorse Publications. In 2010 he founded Poetry East, a poetry venue exploring the relationship between spiritual life and poetry, and attracting many leading poets, including Jo Shapcott, David Constantine, Mark Doty, Don Paterson and Sean O’Brien. Maitreyabandhu has won the Keats-Shelley Prize, the Basil Bunting Award, the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and the Ledbury Festival Poetry Competition. His first pamphlet The Bond won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition (2010) and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. Vita Brevis, his second pamphlet, won the iOTA Shots Award (2011). His first book-length collection, The Crumb Road, was published by Bloodaxe in 2013 and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His second collection, Yarn, followed in 2015. His third Bloodaxe title, After Cézanne, an illustrated meditation on the life and work of the painter, was published in 2019.

All the aspects of Cézanne’s ordeal are fused together in Maitreyabandhu’s remarkable poems in which the varied forms of composition and wide range of reference provide a refreshingly unique insight into Cézanne’s art. What is achieved here is an incomparable poetic expression of the artist’s personal idiosyncrasies and manifold achievements.

• 9 Foreword by Christopher Lloyd 16 Cézanne and the Colour Palette 17 The Method of Loci19 One Hundred Cloche Hats21 The Apple’s Progress 22 The Ambiguities of Place23 Angels in Peckham25 The Black Clock26 The Mannequins of Paris 27 Madame Cézanne with Anti-Representational Effects29 Five Studies for Marie-Hortense 31 Self-portrait of the Artist Wearing a Hat 32 Rilke on the Place de la Concorde33 Sunday Bells35 Cézanne’s Dog36 The House of the Hanged Man37 The Pissarro Portrait39 Cézanne in the Studio41 This Painting of a Mountain43 Man with a Pipe 45 Léontine 49 Cézanne’s Peasant51 The Artist’s Mother52 The Church of Saint-Jean-de-Malte53 Einstein’s Watch 57 Human Things58 Apple, Chairback and Dish59 The Disfluency of Cézanne 60 Kukai in Provence 61 Il Était Plus Grand Que Nous ne le Croyions63 Afterthought 64 The Red Teapot65 Art Tutorial 67 Rilke Writes to His Wife from the Salon D’Automne 69 Morning in the Studio: Les Grandes Baigneuses70 This Perpetual Dazzlement71 Cut-outs73 Matisse in the Studio75 Roger Fry at Langham Place76 For the Artist of Anahorish 77 The Quarry at Bibémus 78 Sufficient Blueness to Give the Feel of Air79 A Worm Composing on a Straw81 Salt83 At the Vollard Shop84 The Three Inseparables85 Bathers at Rest 87 L’Œuvre88 Burnt Lakes 89 Two Dozen Mongoose-Hair Brushes91 The Mountain Ode93 Under Linden Trees95 Vallier96 Opusculum97 On Rough Ground 99 Two Ways of Closing101 A Horde of Destructions 103 Notes