In one way or another, Deloss McGraw has been
working with circus images for a long time. His
collaboration (from the early 80's) with poet W.D.
Snodgrass, beginning with "Who Killed Cock Robin?"
and W.D.'s "Midnight Carnival" produced a body of
work heavily dependant on circus imagry -- clowns,
children, beasts and acrobats balanced precariously
on balls, a tilting chair, funny ropes and ladders
-- all typical circus apparatus but seen in a new
way, with oddly flat figures against an ocean of
incandescence, divorced from all the commercial
images of circus and floating in a dreamland only
Del (and eventually the rest of us) could see.
