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Sunlight on the River: Poems About Paintings, Paintings About Poems

Sunlight on the River: Poems About Paintings, Paintings About Poems

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Sunlight on the River: Poems About Paintings, Paintings About Poems

Edited by Neue Galerie Deputy Director Scott Gutterman

“The intertwining of the visual and the literary is the underlying basis for this provocative and thoughtful anthology . . . What is undeniable is the pleasure in slowly sifting through Gutterman’s choices . . . Gutterman has been brooding, he says, on the associations between poetry and the visual arts for 30 years, and his choice is both intriguing and captivating. It makes us look more intensely, feel — and think.”—Art Quarterly

“This book would make a charming gift for a literary sort with an eye for art, or vice versa. Art ranges from Vermeer to Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko and Larry Rivers. The poets flow from Shakespeare to William Carlos Williams and Rainer Maria Rilke.”—StarTribune

The world’s great poets interpret the world’s great art in this exquisite book that investigates the connection between art and words, deepening our understanding of both.

The poet and the artist share a special kind of vision—an ability to see and penetrate the very essence of their subjects. This volume features poems by writers who turned to paintings for their inspiration, as well as paintings by artists who based their works on poems. Stretching across centuries and styles, this collection includes Rossetti’s haunting sonnet based on Botticelli’s "Primavera"; Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” a masterful meditation on an iconic painting by Picasso; William Carlos Williams’s joyous interpretations of scenes by Breughel; and Adrienne Rich lending a compassionate voice to the subject of Edwin Romanzo Elmer’s "The Mourning Chair". These and other pairings appear as elegant texts facing full page, glowing illustrations of the paintings. An introduction to some of the greatest poets and painters in history, this remarkable book makes a perfect gift, offering compelling insights into the worlds of art and literature, and the relationship between the two.

Hardcover
144 pages | 60 color illustrations
Prestel, 2015
8.6 x 0.8 x 10.9 inches
ISBN 9783791354774
Poetry, Art

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