Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop. Mengham is a significant curator, organising exhibitions: There is no more productive engagement with someone elses artworks than finding the right way to show it, since artworks are always direct statements or questions about articulations of space, and the curators job obviously is to enhance such questions and statements. This discipline gives the writer a series of uniquely privileged perspectives, touching, lifting, moving and re-moving the objects: nothing compares to living with art. The book opens with themes: what is domestic space? what does the atrocity exhibition tell us? what is the refugee aesthetic? Essays on particular artists follow, including Marc Atkins, Stephen Chambers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anselm Kiefer, Laura Owens, Doris Salcedo, Agnes Thurnauer, Koen Vanmechelen and Alison Wilding. Always, he is in dialogue with the work, rather than with the artist.
Rod Mengham is author of several poetry publications, including Unsung (Salt, 2006), Chance of a Storm (Carcanet, 2015), Grimspound & Inhabiting Art (Carcanet, 2018), 2019 the vase in pieces (Oystercatcher, 2019) and of translations, including Speedometry [poems by Andrzej Sosnowski] (Contraband, 2014) and Flatsharing [poems by Anne Portugal] (Equipage, 2021). He was also co-editor and co-translator of the anthology Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc, 2003) and co-editor with John Kinsella of the anthology Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt, 2005). Between 1992 and 2002, he was co-organiser of the annual Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry and since 1992 has been the publisher of Equipage, which has published over 120 pamphlets of contemporary poetry. Rod is Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He has published monographs on Dickens, Emily Bronte and Henry Green; and The Descent of Language (1993); has co-written with Sophie Gilmartin Thomas Hardys Shorter Fiction (EUP, 2007); has edited essay collections on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, fiction of the 1940s, and Australian poetry. He has also curated many exhibitions of contemporary art since 2003, and has made several films with the artist Marc Atkins (soundingpolefilms) as well as the text + image publication Still Moving (London: Veer Publications, 2014). He was a recipient of the Cholmondely Award for poetry in 2020.
* Translations of 10 modern Dutch poets that cast a brilliant light on the world of Dutch poetry.
* The unstable genius Hans R. Vlek, who completed his stunning oeuvre in a mental asylum...
* Gerrit Kouwenaar, whose Eliotesque impersonality and advocacy of language stands like a tent staked out in a hurricane in his homage to his late wife...
* Eva Gerlach, Hester Knibbe, Rob Schouten, Willem van Toorn, J. Eijkelboom, H.H ter Malkt, K. Michel and Esther Jansma...
* A dual-language edition in English and Dutch, with appendices for the poetry aficionado and the scholar.
One of the many reasons that Rod Mengham is such a compelling writer is the clarity of thought and the fine-tuned nature of his sensibilities as both poet and critic. Ive never read a dull sentence of his... Hes amongst the very best (and equally one of the most under-rated) writers on art of his generation. - Tim Marlow
