Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Arts & Letters & Love

Arts & Letters & Love

Kreiling, Jean L.

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1947465511
ISBN13: 9781947465510
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: Mar 10 2018
Pages: 86
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.18 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
Arts & Letters & Love works magic: these poems add new dimensions of lyricism and wit to existing works of art, with figurative language that stops you in your tracks. Jean Kreiling brings the visual arts to life, noting that Van Gogh's shoes reek of years, kilometers, and clues to climate. Her affection for literature percolates through poems like her brilliant sonnet about-and worthy of-Edna St. Vincent Millay. In her observations on music, notes become kites, or strands precisely stitched, or marriage partners on tangled paths. One sonnet makes an assertion that is true of these poems themselves: This music plays the ear.

-Deborah Warren

Whether they address paintings, music, or literature, Jean Kreiling's ekphrastic poems read as absorbing colloquies with works of art. She beautifully shapes her language to her subjects: spare precision for a Hopper, gentle charm for a Cassatt, something more darkly portentous for Delacroix, a nice bit of bathos for Satie, and forthright passion for César Frank's Symphony. Whatever her subject, the frisson of aesthetic pleasure is palpably conveyed. The book's tour de force is the series of poems on Stravinsky's Pulcinella, which is, like the piece it evokes, both cleverly delightful and delightfully clever throughout.

-Dick Davis

Jean Kreiling's Arts & Letters & Love focuses cohesively on the ways high art can touch our middle-to-lowbrow lives. The collection is packed with Kreiling's effortlessly musical sonnets-my favorite is A Thousand Clerks-but shows off her facility with forms of every kind. That skill allows meter and rhyme to produce their happiest effect: making our senses reverberate like living bells.

-Maryann Corbett

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