SOURCE: A review of Sounds, in American Book Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, January-February, 1983, pp. 4-5.

In the following review, Rasula offers a positive assessment of Kandinsky's Sounds, deeming it "one of the essential books of poetry of the century, whatever one may think of Kandinsky's art. "

One of the essential conjunctions between modernists that never came to pass was a meeting between Kandinsky and the London artists of the Wyndham Lewis/Ezra Pound circle. Not that any such meeting was ever a possibility, but the English translation of Sounds makes one wish it had come to pass, somehow, more for Pound's benefit than Kandinsky's, I should add. Lewis and Pound were well aware of Kandinsky, both through his painting and his book On the Spiritual in Art. Lewis' magazine BLAST, appearing in June 1914, contained a lengthy review of Kandinsky's book, recently translated by M.T.H. Sadler under the...