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| Evely Lau - 1989 |
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| 19 September 2026 |
In 1989 I
was called by a publicist called Nancy Flight asking me I would photograph a
brand new 18-year-old poet called Evelyn Lau. The book was called Runaway:
Diary of a Street Kid. I accepted. Flight asked me how I would photograph her.
I told her I was going to do it on her bed. Flight was shocked. I told her, “She
is still a teenager and she probably has a funny bedspread”. She did, it
featured red balloons.
Today I went to room
C225 at the Vancouver campus of University of British Columbia for
the launching and the reading from her new book Parade of Storms. The book
features poems related to what all people talk about these days- the weather.
Halfway
through the talk Lau asked us to try to write a poem. A few of us did.
I decided
to take the advice of:
Baltasar
Gracián (1601–1658) was a Spanish Jesuit priest, Baroque philosopher, and
writer known as a master of conceptismo, a literary style characterized by
witty, terse, and subtle expressions.
Here is my
poem:
Evelyn
Eevelyn
Runaway returned
Balloons on the bed
A beginning
Deserved