Susan de Sola and Clive Watkins have released a lovely book containing perspective- and scale-bending images of the “Little Blue Man,” a diminutive children’s figurine from the unsettling 1960s children’s television show Thunderbirds. Poet Clive Watkins has written a long poem to accompany her photographs, and the result is the new book Little Blue Man. Check it out. Susan de Sola posts a new study-photo each Monday at http://thunderbirdman.tumblr.com/

Extract from “Little Blue Man”:

From the hypothesis of self the self leaks out:
through the comic gap that intervenes
between remembering that the lost car-keys
are not in your purse and the realization
that you are driving; in the sudden knowledge that,
searching for something mislaid last night,
you have just begun checking again
all the places you have checked already—
the cushions on the sofa, the sofa itself,
the curtains, the kitchen cupboards,
the decorative chalk-white vulval fold
of the conch in the tall bookcase—
for the first time, you notice it rests across the edges
of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,
L’Ecole des Femmes and Les Fleurs du Mal
and see behind it what you had missed before,
another bunch of keys unsteadily perched
and about whose use you haven’t, for the moment, a clue.
As when at dawn you are roused from a labyrinthine
dream of dogs by the wet nose and lapping tongue of a dog,
excited and happy to see you again
as if he were the one who was lost:
how much more terrible to discover
that what you took for a dog is in fact a tiger
and the two of you are about to re-enact the scene
commemorated in that cunning musical automaton,
Tipu’s Tiger, with you in the role of victim.
Fiercely the tiger roars; plaintively you wail;
the royal beast is immense,
nine feet long, four and a half feet high.
This is no dream, and you are going to die.

So much for self, then. The little blue man
is whatever she would have him be,
a silent mime posed in such predicaments,
bizarre and dreamlike, as her whim dictates—
though to put him through his paces is to lend
this valiant clad-in-azure ready-made Tom Thumb
a seeming particle of seeming-self, and her fond acts
of challenge and protection, this drama in which
what’s lost is always found, enact a self for her.
Muteness is of the essence:
he will never answer back, never protest.
His head is not an echo-chamber
thronged with the ecstatic buzz-
buzz of conversations that have never happened,
foiled gambits, the droll embarrassments of meaning.
Yet he is not even his own avatar,
for thousands like him are scattered about the world:
adrift in pockets and bags;
dropped by chance at the ancient roots of a tree;
lost in the cool galleries of the museum;
abandoned in a wilderness of glass;
trapped forever beneath ice,
some on their backs, some upright,
some bent double, faces thrust toward their feet;
or consigned to an incinerator far out beyond the city
where toxic smoke can be allowed to rise
at a proper distance from the living.
There is none now he has the power to save.

From the publisher: This jewel-like chapbook has a long poem by English poet Clive Watkins interleaved with 12 full-color photo plates by Susan de Sola. These imaginative photos feature a small action-figure from the 1960s, oddly, sometimes playfully, out of context. The engaging poem reflects the photo-images in ways both humorous and serious . . .

” Little Blue Man strikes me as a beautifully original idea that appeals to the child in every perceptive adult.” – Anne Stevenson

“This chapbook is a real delight both to look at and read. The images are lovely, playful and poignant, making a mystery of the photographer’s sense of play which the poet does not explain but rather explores and deepens. I especially enjoyed the places where Clive Watkins, the poet, teases the figure and action of Susan de Sola, the photographer, out of the picture as though de Sola were a goddess of the Little Blue People. There is, as Watkins characterizes it, an “unconsoling gaiety” throughout this little book, and a disproportionately large amount of charm.” – Meredith Bergmann