Poems About Sculpture [Hardcover]

Poems About Sculptureis a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form.

Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats’s Grecian urn and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to contemporary verse about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman’s wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts—clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more—into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another,Poems About Sculptureis a treat for art lovers of all kinds.Foreword by Robert Pinsky
Introduction by Murray Dewart
 
THE GODS
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Archaic Torso of Apollo
ROBERT PINSKY, Genesis According to George Segal
ISAIAH, “What likeness will you find for God”
EMILY DICKINSON, Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
DENISE LEVERTOV, Art
LAURA RIDING, Incarnations
ROBERT BLY, Chinese Tomb Guardians
DANA GIOIA, The Angel with the Broken Wing
CLAUDE MCKAY, Russian Cathedral
RUMI, The Ruins of the Heart
HENRIETTA CORDELIA RAY, The Tireless Sculptor
H. D., Adonis
DYLAN THOMAS, from Prologue to theCollected Poems
WILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger
JACK GILBERT, Measuring the Tyger
ROBERT PINSKY, The Ghost Hammer
BASIL BUNTING, See! Their verses are laid