No More Pretty Pictures by Tom Radzienda

No More Pretty Pictures by Tom Radzienda

A short collection of poetry from Tom Radzienda, a well known expatriate poet in Bangkok.

From the back cover:
Can we return to the simple pleasures of life? The colours of a flower? Listening to the wind? Poetry will bring us to the mountains through imagination, and closer to genuine self.

Do we even sense that modern urban life is a prison? Or are we so accustomed to it that we consider it normal? Reading poems will awaken our consciousness to a purer, non-technological, unadvertised reality.

I hope to give insight into the deep source of sorrow and pain in our society and discover a cure, rather than merely offer a distraction from the mundane demands of incorporated life.

In the corporate mind, art is merely entertainment to distract us and turn us into mindless consumers. Yet art has a much deeper responsibility to awaken, incite, and inspire. Freed from the demands of making profit, art can liberate us from the dulling effects of culture, bureaucracy, and our own servile compliance with the status quo.

No more pretty pictures. The greater beauty is in our own freedom to imagine.

Tom Radzienda

Paperback
52 pages
Bangkok 1999
Pentameter Press International
ISBN 9789748647777