Garden of the Painter at Saint Clair, 1908 Under the cool blue slats of palm trees, a table and two empty chairs; an invitation to come and sit in this luminous paradise, perhaps with morning coffee as the sun squeezes lemon light through the scaffolding, Or perhaps with a glass of wine in late afternoon as grapey shadows lengthen, stain the ground. There are purple and yellow iris in the foreground, colours laid down in long strokes, the way the foliage slices the light. We’re not there, of course, but we could be, even if it’s just the garden of our dreams. Here, paint has stopped time in its blue and gold tracks. And these flowers keep unfolding. Barbara Crooker This poem is from the author's book, Les Fauves, C&R Press, 2017. Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and has published eight full collections and twelve chapbooks. Her latest book is Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017). She has won a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. A VCCA fellow, she has published widely in such journals as Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Green Mountains Review, The Denver Quarterly, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. website: www.barbaracrooker.com
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Restless The big feet of the tall thin men ground them as they walk. They are always walking leaning forward to gain an unreachable momentum. Restless spirits, encased in bronze, in stasis. Only their shadows and dreams escape. Derek Adams Derek Adams is a professional photographer, originally from London, he now lives in Suffolk. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths and his poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and abroad. He has a collection Everyday Objects, Chance Remarks (Littoral, 2005) and pamphlets Postcards to Olympus and unconcerned but not indifferent: the life of Man Ray. He is currently working on a collection of poems about the American photographer, model and WW2 correspondent Lee Miller. Road Apricot sunrise caught me under a green blanket. It enters as it will with no apology, no blame. If I take the road across the wolds, how long before the fields end and you begin? Is that the sea? I’ll never make that drive, nor you return to me. Laura Cherry Editor's note: The photograph shown is a placeholder image. Laura Cherry's poem was inspired by David Hockney's The Road Across the Wolds (UK, 1997.) We hope you will follow this link to see the painting so that you get the full effect of the poem. Laura Cherry is the author of the collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books) and the chapbooks Two White Beds (Minerva Rising) and What We Planted (Providence Athenaeum). She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press). Her work has been published in journals including Antiphon, Clementine Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, Cider Press Review, Tuesday; An Art Project, and Hartskill Review. Virginia Woolf’s Walking Cane at the New York Public Library
I should be in Hyde Park Gate, or Monk’s House, or St. Ives, or with Vanessa’s grandchildren, who remember us, gladly, the strolls we took, there was rhythm in your long stride, we made our own waves —one two three, one two three, our tips clicking down the stairs of your Bloomsbury flat. On our final walk, you raced me to the river Ouse, your pockets bulging with rocks. I was all that floated that day. Someone found me, returned me to Leonard, he kept me until he couldn’t, then, like you, set me free. But here I am, in a glass case, the top half of a question mark, still bearing your weight. Joanne Rocky Delaplaine Joanne Rocky Delaplaine’s first full-length poetry book The Local World, will be published in 2019. Her poems have appeared or will be forthcoming in Poet Lore, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Innisfree Poetry Journal, International Literary Quarterly, The Northern Virginia Review, Potomac Review, Free State Review, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. Her poems have won Best of the Net (2015) and first place in the Bethesda Literary Festival Poetry Contest, 2014. She co-directs the Café Muse poetry-reading series in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and teaches Iyengar yoga with a specialty in back care. Max Beckmann, Self Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927 "It is my fortune, or misfortune, that I can see neither all in black nor all in white. One vision alone would be much simpler and clearer, but then it would not exist.” Max Beckmann Facing you, my audience, with this impassive frontal stare, I am twentieth century Mittel Europa’s flower, man of the hour, not poor bare unaccommodated man, but the thing itself, civilized product of the culture of a continent. Composed, in a stance of command, I am the owner of my face. My suit is armour, the drawing room’s armour, salon’s, the city’s. Promethean man, I am owner of fire; the cigarette in my hand tells you I command it. There is nothing ambiguous about these statements. They are declared in the black and white blocks of colour in my portrait, black tux, white evening shirt, black tie, the black and white patches of shadow and light on my face, hands, white dash of cigarette, blocks of colour that define my absolute authority, unquestioned, unquestionable. Have I given you enough reasons to question? Sandra Kohler Sandra Kohler is a poet and teacher. Her third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of the 2002 Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many others over the past 40 years. Dusk at Baie des Anges, 1932 poem based on an excerpt of the painting Dufy studied couleur-lumière, the effect of light on colour, turned the Mediterranean into a pool of flat cerulean. No wind riffles the water; this is sea as satin tablecloth or slab of marble. That smooth. That cool. Here in Virginia, blue jays have been interrupting my morning with their imperious squawks. Their feathers, the blue fire of the Côte d’Azur in summer. In Dufy’s oils, the sky sings hyacinthine. There is no motion; even the lone palm on the right hand side of the painting holds its breath. The figures in the foreground are poised, waiting for night to come down and paint them midnight, cold steel, indigo. . . . Barbara Crooker This poem is from the author's book, Les Fauves, C&R Press, 2017. Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian-Americana, and has published eight full collections and twelve chapbooks. Her latest book is Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017). She has won a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. A VCCA fellow, she has published widely in such journals as Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Green Mountains Review, The Denver Quarterly, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. website: www.barbaracrooker.com Woman, Dakota Territory
with appreciation for Harvey Dunn’s painting – Dakota Woman – and for my family’s history She would sit for hours absorbing all the colors of the prairie naming them even reciting them to herself as though she knew repetition would help her eyes remember the honeyed blond blankets of wheat the dancing bitter green of wild grasses outcroppings of vivid cornflower blue columbine red. She learned to recognize the scarlet lake of devil’s paintbrush and the vibrant purple of the sharp-tipped thistle. She memorized the plaited evening skies smoldering gold dove grey pink the surprise of deep periwinkle. Even the dirt though it darkened her children’s clothes called out to her a rich peat shot through with threads of blackened burnt ochre. She gathered those days to herself while her husband gave away land telling eager settlers which parcel of prairie they could claim as their own. It seemed to her that the land belonged to the sky. Her son didn’t drown until after they’d gone back east. He couldn’t navigate the gaping hole the sudden unexpected pit opening in the shallows of the river. But for all the years to come one image of him always in her mind always on the Dakota plains his solemn grey eyes fixed on hers behind his head a thin line of amethyst stretched along a wide horizon. Melissa Huff This poem was first published by Highland Park Poetry in the book, 2017 Poetry Challenge. Melissa Huff has returned to her love of writing after fifteen satisfying years immersed in making one-of-a-kind jewelry (www.melissahuff.com). When she needed to use more of her intuition and craved a less linear creative process, sculpting poems by folding words around images and ideas turned out to be just the thing. Melissa enjoys exploring both formal poetry and free verse, for which she has garnered awards from the Chicago-based Poets & Patrons as well as the Illinois State Poetry Society and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her publishing credits include Highland Park Poetry, Winterwolf Press, Glass: Facets of Poetry and River Poets Journal. She currently serves as secretary of the Illinois State Poetry Society. La Llamada (The Call), Remedios Varo (Mexico), 1961
In the courtyard of stone caryatids one figure comes to life a woman bathed in gold starshine, her robes emanating incense and light her face, the face of the Madonna her hair, wild orange-red, a swirling umbilicus still tied to the evening star, Venus high in the dark sky above this massive courtyard where women’s figures emerge from limestone walls surrounding her, yearning for her freedom and life Kendall Dunkelberg Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women, where he also directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium. Dunkelberg has published the poetry collections Barrier Island Suite,Landscapes and Architectures and Time Capsules, and a collection of translated poems by the Belgian poet, Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including recently inThe Texas Review, About Place, and Town Creek Poetry, Postcard Poems and Prose and in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vo. 2: Mississippi. His introductory multi-genre creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft was published by Palgrave MacMillan, and he is editor of Poetry South and advisor for Ponder Review. www.kendalldunkelberg.com West Wind
I. She’s a smudge, although she doesn’t know it; doesn’t see enough of her surroundings to know she blends in to them: sage and brush brown, her skin obscured, eyes dim from the cold. If she knew, she would paint herself red in heather berries, soak her clothes in mulberry dye, dip her arms in up to the elbow before she went out into the world on the edge of a storm. She doesn’t know. Why would she need to be seen? II. It’s the height that she doesn’t understand, the rain only baffles her as it comes on sideways and sharp. And the purple above the cloudline twists her stomach, so she doesn’t look up. She would worship older gods if it weren’t too late. She would become them in one motion, like the grasses and the buffeted flaps of her clothing. She would become. If only she knew how to. III. A woman carries a basket of berries across the heather, looking out at the roaring maw of the sky in apprehension. She must remind me of cave drawings, the way I am drawn to her, sculptures that were brown-wood and womanhood, carved by men in their free time, unaware that years later it would be art, and they would be artists; years later and the sepia of her common dress (and arm and hat and basket) would remind me of them. That their art had become self-aware. IV. She would bleed into the sky if I let her, her pigment twisted by wind shown only by brushstrokes, her definition lost, her gale-swept outline now infinite, growing. Become cloud, become rain, become wind, become the colors of the heavens before a storm: purple, grey, sepia. V. Does she know she’s on the edge of the world? Does she know that the sky might be white or blue or midnight green somewhere else? Like when yesterday on the bus I complained about the darkness of early afternoon in winter, and Sarah told me all the places it was early morning at that exact moment, which helped. Therapy is imagining the theoretical and accepting it as reality. Therapy is standing in the sun on purpose, or searching out all the non-existent colours in the sky, or looking at brushstrokes that trick the mind into imagining the concept of wind. Norah Brady Norah Brady is a fifteen year old poet, actor, and wanna-be author. She’s most at home anywhere she can write, preferably with two cats and quite a few books. You can find her work in Rookie magazine, The Blue Marble Review, and Write the World’s 2017 collection: Young Voices Across the Globe. Pepper's Ghost
Dancing on a pinpoint of hope, like a lingering whisper you fly, hazy and billowing, circling in liquid air. Your silence is a siren call. As I sail in my ship of grief, I glance toward the sky to find the trail of stars that will take me to Arcadia, your hallowed space where lights blaze and dark places are dark no longer. A ghostly mirage, you’re pale-faced in the gloom, and yet you glimmer, like a candle in a distant window. You’re the faith that restores promise, despite haunting fancies swimming, knocking at the backdoor of the mind. Though melancholy fills my lungs and weighs me down to sinking point, I see your outstretched arm and rise A breath away from breaking your enchantment, reaching consciousness enough, I touch the fluted edges of your dress. Enigma, gossamer flower, you diminish. My fingerprint, a labyrinth, home to earthen soil of growth and love and blood, corrupts you. Waning in the glass, your chiffon ruffles melt into a distant nebula, blurred form that taints me with sorrow. Your presence clings to this dusty air, much longer after you’ve gone. Ellie Nevin Editor's note: This poem was written in response to Kate Moss wearing designer Alexander McQueen's Autumn/Winter 2006 Collection. Ellie Nevin is a Yorkshire lass who is living in Lancaster to study a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. She is a poet at heart but also dabbles in other creative areas such as painting and sketching when she has the time! |
The Ekphrastic Review
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