PACIFIC. Type A & B - Board Wargame for 2 Players.

Folding board, two thick card sheets, printed & die-stamped with the counters (which are un-popped), A4 instruction sheet, in original plastic sleeve. Wild Hawthorn Press, Stonypath, Dunsyre, Lanark, Scotland,

See Ian Hamilton Finlay & the Wild Hawthorn Press: A Catalogue Raisonné [Graeme Murray Gallery, Edinburgh, 1990.] p.28.

"One is prepared for surprises in [Finlay's] work, but not, perhaps, for the advent of PACIFIC... Finlay has previously designed a slate and marble chess set with austerely shaped pieces resembling submarine conning towers, but that was a contemporary invigoration of a traditional game... that was to erect irony upon artifice, that was the traditional mode - with certain differences! - of the poet. It was quite another thing to invite someone to win or lose a game with another player... what had this raiding game to do with the raid on the inarticulate (Eliot?) Poetry may be a superior kind of play, but can play be a superior kind of poetry?" [Orvell "Poe and the Poetics of Pacific" in Ian Hamilton Finlay Collaborations. p.17]

Ironic re-invigoration? Concrete Poem? Wargame? All of the above? Maybe best to leave it unused as has the previous owner, the pieces still perfect & unpopped from their card sheets.

Stock Code: 90817