A collection of poems written 2016 to 2017, "World in Black and White" is a bold endeavor for a first book, comprising of a multitude of forms from a dozen or fewer epigrammatic lines, to uniquely fragmentary passages, to entire pages of sprawling lines - not unlike headstone blocks of prose poetry. The poetical style and voice of Robert Wakefield is heavily influenced by major tenors of modernist poetry such as vivid imagism, decadence and bone-dry desiccation. The rawness, savage beauty, and lyrical intensity of the text communicates the author’s zealous awareness of the Artist’s duty to aesthetically represent reality, but to remain honest to the truth of that reality. Strikingly intense, but altogether a terse and impressionistic chapbook of poetry, Robert Wakefield’s self-described “vision art" is brandished emphatically in "World in Black and White."