Clouds, leaves, waves was published in 1996. It was published by Jon Rabinowitz of Turtle Point Press, NY.
A forward was written by Harold Bloom.
Here
from the forward:
A surface hardened by repetition
becoming by shade
meaning less, distanced like Art.
That seems to me an epitome of Clouds, Leaves, Waves: always
haunted by the great presence of Stevens, this Notebook hovers
between Botts’s paintings and Stevens’s poems, trying to perform an
impossible but poignant labor of mediation. What Stevens called “the
fiction of the leaves” goes back as far as Homer and the Bible, but
seems to have taken its decisive turn, for Stevens, in Shelley’s “Ode to
the West Wind,” which is the direct source of Botts’s title, Clouds,
Leaves, Waves. When Shelley cried out to the wind, asking it to lift
him as a cloud, a leaf, a wave, he consciously and despairingly reduced
himself to object-status. There is much of Shelley’s Lucretian
skepticism in Stevens (as there was in the Epicurean Whitman), but
Botts clearly responds not so much to this but rather to what Emerson
calls the Optative Mood of American Romantic tradition. There is, to
be sure, much darkness in Botts’s Clouds, Leaves, Waves, but the
larger impression, as in his paintings, is one of affirmation. As
throughout American Romantic tradition, this is a highly qualified
affirmation, but that is not an affirmed qualification.
