Art & Wonder: An Illustrated Anthology of Visionary Poetry

by Kate Farrell (Editor)

Hardcover, 1996

Status

Available

Genres

Fiction

Collection

Michael Lieberman Collection

Publication

Boston, MA : Little, Brown and Co., 1996.

Description

"Visions of paradise, secrets of existence, the world of dreams ... This luminous anthology unites visionary poetry from all over the world with masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Offering glimpses of realms beyond everyday experience are poetic wishes, dreams, prophecies, and epiphanies, simple to sublime, from many viewpoints and times. Most are illuminated by two works of art, unfolding each poem's mystery with richness and clarity." "Balthus's Girl at a Window suggests the literal setting of Emily Dickinson's "I Dwell in Possibility," while on the facing page Paul Klee's glowing gardens conjure up a kingdom of magic and wonder. Henri-Edmond Cross's Landscape with Stars and Henri Matisse's Icarus together evoke the cosmic journey celebrated in Charles Baudelaire's "Elevation." Mysterious scenes in Japanese lacquer echo Mary Oliver's "Sleeping in the Forest," and mythic paintings by Thomas Cole and J. M. W. Turner animate Rainer Maria Rilke's invocation to awakening gods." "Such diverse voices as Sappho, William Blake, Langston Hughes, Rabindranath Tagore, Kabir, and Saint Teresa of Avila accompany equally varied works of art. Henry David Thoreau's vision of timeless harmony appears with an ancient Greek statue of a harp player; William Shakespeare's sonnet about lucid dreaming, with Constantin Brancusi's Sleeping Muse. Throughout, an inspiring flow of poetic and artistic visions creates a buoyant tour of the creative imagination."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member deckla

This intriguing little book does something I've always loved doing, which is to pair visual art with poetry, here using works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections. So the title works in several ways: first, the work envisions, on some level, the poems chosen. Second, visionary poetry

is used in the Blakeian sense; this is poetry that dreams of other worlds, other ways of being. That said, the poems are mostly from the classical canon, and rather relentlessly optimistic. Here you'll find Whitman, Yeats, Rimbaud, Lorca, Coleridge (guess which poem?)...One positive is that many poems are translated, from other cultures. There are some good, unusual poems--Mary Oliver's Sleeping in the Forest, and Rilke's The Angels come to mind.

Yet the book is wonderful for the art alone, reproduced on glossy paper. Favorite pairings; Chana Bloch's poem Day-Blind with Edward Hopper's From Williamsburg Bridge, Dickinson's "As if the sea should part" with Arthur B. Davies's Unicorns, and Herbert's echo poem Heaven with Joachim Patiner's The Penitance of St. Jerome.

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