The Poet Dreaming in the Artist's House: Contemporary Poems About the Visual Arts

Borrowing the title from a Howard Nemerov poem, this volume presents poems about art, describing famous artists, specific works in general, and the nature of art as a function of life. The poetry of such accomplished contemporary writers as Howard Nemerov, Denise Levertov, David Wagoner, and Patricia Hampl stands out among that of lesser-known poets. Most of the poems are evocative and sensual as a painting or sculptures they attempt to capture in words. The poems are accompanied by vivid, surreal sketches. In their preface Roston and Buchwald, both of them poets who include their own work here, write that "these poems affirm for us the fact that the impulse to make art and to write poems rises out of the same desire to sing "the secret history of the mind." This anthology successfully links visual art and poetic art in an attractive, slender volume.