In Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses by Susan McCaslin

The Bathers, by Paul Cezanne, 1898–1905.

 
In Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses
 
 
flesh once again sings itself solid
               where a sapphire river
mates with the hearing eye
 
 
Titian   Tintoretto   Rubens
             rise again in oils
from Impressionism’s shimmer:
                                                      sculpted clouds
 
trees vaulting over flesh’s density
 
the correspondences:
                                                                        taste seeing
                                                                        touch sounding
                                                                                                            (as Baudelaire sang)
 
Faces’                                   
androgynous blurs
                          bodies                  
                                       articulate
                                                       symmetries
 
                                                                                 in groupings
                                                                                                           of five
                                                                                                           and eight
rendering poetry and painting
             each other’s
                                                   semblances and frères
 
 
After seven years’ labour
                                                                                          he leaves the work
 
                                                    unfinished

 
 
 Susan McCaslin
 
This work is a segment of a book-length sequence of poems on Paul Cézanne to be published by Quattro Books in Toronto in Oct. 2016.

Susan McCaslin is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry and nine chapbooks.  She completed her Ph.D. at UBC in 1984 and taught at Douglas College in B.C. in the English and Creative Writing Departments for twenty-three years.  Most recently, Susan has published a memoir, Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Toronto: Inanna Press, 2014), a spiritual autobiography exploring the sixteen-years she spent as a young woman learning from Olga Park, an elderly mystic from Port Moody, British Columbia. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Disarmed Heart (Toronto: The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2014), explores the roots of violence and peace-making in the individual, the community, and the world.  Her previous volume, Demeter Goes Skydiving (2012), was short-listed for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award) in 2012.