McCool by Aidan Andrew Dun - Prospectus

McCool Aidan Andrew Dun

GOLDMARK路UPPINGHAM路MMX

xxi Old infidelities of war: a saddened, disillusioned world winks.

‘It’s me, the whore, they’re fighting for’, sings Helen, ‘I’m as the world thinks.’

Her Grecian beauty on the towers, goddess of moonlight and sunflowers, self-hating as Gala, truly cursed when she called herself the worst slut because her wandering eye, warm (with greenish-brown backlit) on some good-looking man alit, focussed on some incidental guy.

Parker felt himself lowered, cheapened.

The private seemed to cool down. Deepened.

A hot night in a Beirut cathouse appeared to kill the bugaboo; overheating desert rat and ‘spouse’ did the flophouse bedroom boogaloo, that oldest dance of ill-repute: Enkidu and the prostitute, the wildman and his knowing ‘wife’.

Parker’s doubts about the strife, the justness of the war, reflected (as he romanced his young harlot, cute, nubile soft-porn starlet) the sense of a dirty act infected.

Gala hunted with her gaze so pure, green eyes full of innocent allure.

[15]

xxii

2

June in the vast metropolis.

The city like a sinking ship dives in flame through an abyss of houses, towers; seems to slip down an incline of despair, through a filthy atmosphere of getting as opposed to giving.

(Can these be said to be the living, who drag themselves through the streets, briefcases and laptops supercharged with that worldview which has enlarged the vested interest of elites?)

Look, isn’t that the great Titanic submerged beneath the North Atlantic?

i

London Town of the oligarchs: it’s so elegant by the river; and if you live close to great parks, such pleasure. It’s a life-giver to be anywhere near greenery, otherworldly scenery, waterbirds that glide across your cares, suave, white, unruffled millionaires.

(Swans, among aquatic avians, seem the yachts of the feathered races.)

Equity traders don’t change places with dangerous Rastafarians whose meditations in the night cool down a neighbourhood gunfight.

ii

[17]

Pages shown smaller than actual size

Goldmark Books is proud to announce the publication of McCool by Aidan Andrew Dun. McCool is a love story, a war story, set in the near future, told as a verse novel. In the spring of , after a western coalition invasion of Lebanon, Gala’s husband, Colonel Parker James, is deployed to the frontline and remains in the Middle East through summer and autumn.

Anxious, lonely - childless - Galatea impulsively moves to London to resume a career as an art journalist where her path crosses that of the war painter McCool. As the narrative unfolds in sonnet form a soldier becomes a pacifist, a tortured visionary develops a passion for pure beauty, and tragically, ecstatically, a woman becomes a goddess...

Published rd February . Available in two versions: D P  pages, size  x  mm, edition of .

Price £ + p&p C’ H  pages, size  x  mm, edition of .

Casebound, signed and numbered, housed in a slipcase with two cds of the author reading the entire work.

Price £ + p&p To order: Telephone   Email info@goldmarkart.com Write to Goldmark Books at the address below.

Further details of McCool and other Goldmark publications may be found at www.goldmarkbooks.com.

G B  Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland, LE SQ