Colourworks is a scholarly, detailed, in-depth investigation into how color is utilized in both poetry and art writing. It explores the way poets use color in their creations and also how their readers respond to and “think” color. Harrow concentrates on three well-known and brilliant French literary figures: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy. She argues that these poets provide us “with ways of problematizing colour in the exploratory texts of poetry and art writing” (p. 3). She also draws on other textual formats such as journalism, cultural critique and correspondence.
Harrow chose these three writers because “their work represents a major defining current of poetic modernism in its pursuit of innovation, its probing of consciousness, and its exploration of interart and visual values” (p. 3). There is a considerable lacuna in literary scholarship concerning the analysis of color in writing, and I believe Harrow has done a wonderful...