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PURCHASE A DRAWING

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To purchase one of Pieter's drawings contact him via telephone [401-351-9542] during the months of November through April.

 

May through October you can set up a purchase by finding him somewhere in the Adirondack High Peaks. A better option would be to send Pieter a letter. [ Pieter Vanderbeck \ 7 Governor Street \ Providence, RI 02906 ]

 

Reservations can be obtained by contacting the webmaster.

Due to the limitations of digital photography (because the images of Pieter's artwork on this page were taken with flash photography), the colors and lighting of the drawings may not be exactly as they appear. They will be better in person.

PURCHASE A BOOK

COFFEE BREAK  

by Pieter Vanderbeck   Published by: The Poet's Press

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Purchase physical copy on Amazon. ($12.95)

 

Purchase digital copy from Poet's Press  ($4)

 

It’s easy to treat the “little people” who do the world’s unmemorable jobs as comical characters, like the bus drivers and sewer workers in televison’s The Honeymooners, or to veer to the other extreme in tragic portrayals like Death of a Salesman. Now artist and poet Pieter Vanderbeck dons the cap of Nikolai Gogol and lifts the lid on a microcosm of American corporatism amid a humble cast of characters: security guards, desk clerks, maintenance men, and janitors working at the bottom rung of an unspecified company.


Coffee Break spins from America’s caffeine obsession and the relentless, aggressive advertising that once dominated the radio airwaves, and focuses on a crew of working men and women who seldom leave the corridors, offices and infrastructures of a single building, for whom the coffee break is a brief respite of humanity and a glimmer of camraderie. Atop them is a supervisor, and atop him, an arrogant anthill of bosses with schemes, theories, controls and disciplines.


Coffee Break is comedy, rife with satire on the limited, and self-limiting, perspectives of workers who know little else than work, but it goes deeper, showing how those at every level of a company enact the inept cruelties of their bosses upon those below them, so that even a janitors’ workroom or a restroom stall, becomes a place of surveillance.   (Blurb by Brett Rutherford.)

TWILIGHT OF THE DICTATOR'S  

by Pieter Vanderbeck w/ Brett Rutherford   Published by: The Poet's Press, 1992

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Buy a physical copy on Amazon.

Digital edition at the Poet's Press

Unknown to one another until the mid-1980s, poets Brett Rutherford and Pieter Vanderbeck had each been writing intense narrative and satirical poems about Russia and Eastern Europe for many years.

 

The first edition of this book came out in 1992, with both the horrors of totalitarian regimes, and the jubilation of liberation, expressed in its pages. Tracing terror and resistance in Russia, Romania, East Germany through the lens of the persecuted artist -- such as a nameless writer in Rumania pursued and beaten by thugs, or Shostakovich's years of midnight watches for the men in black he expected to take him to the Gulag -- this book is a monument to the spirit that resists. Now, in the 21st century, the poets return with a second edition, capturing the ghastly ironies of this new era, and they do not spare local tyrants-in-training as they turn their attention to Buddha-dynamiting holy men and the American military-industrial juggernaut that never saw a country it didn't want to trample. A handful of other poignant poems reflect on "Growing Up With Mushroom Clouds.

 

This is a somber book, graced with biting satire and narrative power: two deeply humanist poets grappling with the inhumanity of power. Highlights include "Stalin and Shostakovich;" a fantasy about animated pianos driving Russians from Poland; an elegy for Czech martyr Jan Palach; celebrations of the destruction and melting of Lenin and Stalin statues; and the flight of Romania's dictator, "The Genius of the Carpathians." Illustrated with line drawings by Pieter Vanderbeck.

Blurb by Brett Rutherford

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