The book artist

Old Bibles are the best, she said

on account of their exceptionally fine pages,

so easily twisted into delicate arrangements.

Pages of Macabees formed a nave,

Ecclesiastes gave itself to arches, ribbed vaulting

and fine Gothic tracery.

On the studio wall were pages cut and folded

from an illustrated Tales of Hans Christian Andersen,

concertina butterflies lifting from each sheet.

Medical journals, rescued from a university bin,

had their pages contoured to make landscapes

forged from knife and glue,

from scissors, needle and thread.

One volume resembled terraced fields in Bali,

another a Himalayan terrain.

A copy of Sylvia Plath’s collected works

was shredded to ribbons

and displayed inside a bell jar

like a taxidermied bird-of-paradise.

Some of Baudelaire’s pages were cut

into featherlike strips, puffed out

to resemble a tribal mask.

On a bench, what looked like an orbital sander’s disc,

consisted of the entire volumes of In Search of Lost Time,

compressed and tightly wound.

It’s a kind of rescue, she said,

this reusing and reconstructing

of the unloved. A refuge

for the homeless, the no longer needed.

At least this way, she said,

these books will be seen.