Raag Leaves for Paresh Chakraborty

Andrew Brewerton is the Principal of Dartington College of Arts, Visiting Professor of the University of Plymouth, and Honorary Professor of Fine Art at Shanghai University. He is a poet, and author of more than thirty journal and catalogue essays on contemporary glass.Formerly Head of Glass (1994-6) and Dean of Art & Design (1996-2004) at the University of Wolverhampton, having worked for a decade (1984-94) in the glass crystal manufacturing and design. As Head of Design and Development at Dartington Crystal he was responsible for the Frankfurt Fair award-winning Dartington Limited Editions collection in 1991, which was selected for the Corning New Glass Review, profiled by Crafts magazine, and purchased for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.His international work as an educator has involved collaborative development of academic glass programmes at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and Shanghai University, and of the Consol Glasshouse at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa, as well as public art projects in the UK and China.

Raag Leaves is a sequence of poems offered to the author's friend, the artist Paresh Chakraborty, one of whose works graces the cover of this volume. The sequence of 37 short lyrics - printed on the recto pages only - demonstrates what some of us have known for some time: that Andrew Brewerton's quiet poetic voice is a powerful one, creating an ambitious new work, very much in the modernist tradition. The resulting book is a fitting memorial for Paresh Chakraborty's daughter.