In Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, Keith Garebian, himself an insatiable cineaste, has masterfully spliced together an engaging book-length portrait of a filmmaker, visual artist, poet, sexual rebel, and gardener who double-dared the conventions of art, desire, and filmmaking. Derek Jarman’s final film, Blue, is a work without visuals except International Klein Blue, and it provides Garebian with an inspired backdrop against which he explores, in the book’s poignant closing section, the filmmaker’s descent into illness-induced blindness, charting his physical and emotional decline while also building towards a kind of defiant holy death equal to the passions of Jarman’s most sacred martyrs: Caravaggio, St. Sebastian, and Jesus Christ.

In this life-affirming, cinematic, at turns randy and elegiac verse-biography, Keith Garebian celebrates one of the world’s truly unforgettable and rebellious spirits.