BOOK REVIEW: A BOOK OF DAYS by Patti Smith

Shane | 19 May 2023 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: A BOOK OF DAYS by Patti Smith
Bloomsbury Publishing
November 2022 – $39.99
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
95%

Lumped in with the punk scene when she first came to prominence in the ‘70s, Patti Smith has evolved in our consciousness to something far more unique: a poet, an artist, an author, a musician, in all things defying generalisation and genrefication.

Here she has assembled a fascinating year of photographs, one per day, cherry-picked from her Instagram posts. She started posting a daily photograph in 2018 – a photo of her hand was her first offering, with the caption “Hello Everybody!”

Photos of her kids, late friends, graves of her fallen heroes such as William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Path, Albert Camus, her Abyssinian cat Cairo, mementoes of her storied life, images from her wide and varied travels, or simply from her New York apartment. All are captioned succinctly and insightfully.

Charles Baudelaire, for instance, was born on 9th April, 1821. Smith’s photograph of a photoportrait of him is captioned, “He believed that genius was childhood recovered at will. This belief carried him through his darkest hours, when he dipped his pen into an inkwell yet another time.”

A collection of guitar pedals appears on 20th May. “The foot pedals of resonant mastery: a dissonant monsoon, a cacophonic cathedral, the sounds of a weeping heart.”

A Book Of Days may seem trivial at first glance – we all post pictures of our pets, loved ones, the places we go and the things which mean something to us, after all. Quickly, however, a fascinating insight into the mind of this singular artist begins to unfold.

In the words of the press release for this book, it is “a timeless offering for deeply uncertain times, an inspirational map of an artist’s life.”

More, A Book Of Days is a book of love. Her love of art, of her children, of her own experiences, and of those who came before to show her – and us – the way. Thus, it becomes a work of art in and of itself.