You’re invited to the launch on Wednesday 19 October at 7.00 pm of Black Book: An Assemblage of the Fragmentary (Shearsman Books), by Robert Vas Dias, in collaboration with the artist Julia Farrer, to take place at St. James’s Church, 197 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LL. Author and artist will be present to sign copies of the book, and refreshments will be served. Admission is free.

Black Book is the first major collaboration between a poet and artist reacting to the worst humanitarian crisis of our times since the second world war. This stunningly produced book “confronts us with what has become our common world since the initiation of the ‘war on terror’… and is as up-to-date as this morning’s news,” writes Robert Hampson.

Mel Gooding writes: “Vas Dias is an experimental poet whose language is always simple and direct, who does not beat around the bush, except to flush out a startling truth, transform the familiar to a strangeness. Farrer is an artist for whom the abstract is a means to the controlled expression of the deepest and most sharp feelings, to a refinement of poignancy, a stoic poise.”

And the Revd. Lucy Winkett: “Listen to this black book bringing cruel comfort to a world as it is.

And still dreaming of how it could be.”