LOST CITIES (prompted by Kathy Prendergast's City Drawings, Kettles Yard Gallery, Cambridge, June 1998) The fine-mesh grey of massing raincloud thumbprints sections of the brain till closing in it dawns you're floating like an astronaut can see the cities of the world like mazes in a faded school-book carbon strata whorls of shell or rock or wood the rivers, hills and bays that parks and avenues have grown around sensing as you zoom in closer cafés, benches, tunnels, freeways playgrounds, graveyards you once knew in dense, frenetic, storm-black Beirut the full-haired profile that is Tokyo the sharply crooked arm of Oslo the smudge of Vientiane, Port Moresby the cirrus wisp of Bairiki.

André Mangeot 1998