WRITTEN EYE: VISUALS/VERSE by A. Robert Lee offers poems whose starting point or source of inspiration is a work of visual art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, Lee seeks both to engage and amplify their meaning. Accessible and insightful, these delightful poems express the poet’s playful attention to a wide international range of paintings, photography, films, sculptures and architecture, and the impact literary and visual arts can have on society. For those interested in the re-thinking of ekphrastic poetry’s motives and purposes, and the interplay between poetry and visual art, WRITTEN EYE: VISUALS/VERSE is essential reading.
Here's What People Are Saying
“Somewhere between what we see and what that vision asks of us, is poetry. In art’s reciprocal space A. Robert Lee’s WRITTEN EYE: VISUALS/VERSE lingers, bringing to readers ‘entrance words’ to engage their own “witness eye.” This catalogue of seeing, this caressing litany of artistic encounters across continents takes us from the surfaces of photographs, film, sculpture, architecture, and painting to their interior reverberations — and ours. Lee’s poetry brings to this ‘feast of angle’ a wealth of knowledge, an eye for striking detail, and a poet’s questions. From Georgia O’Keeffe to Ai Weiwei, the Parthenon to Prague, take this tour: This is imagination alive, exhaling.” ~Kimberly M. Blaeser, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, author of Apprenticed to Justice (2017)
“A. Robert Lee’s enquiring eye roams over paintings, photographs, sculptures, movies, buildings and cityscapes. Whether in occident or orient, whether surveying a railway station or the Acropolis, whatever he sees he describes, quizzes, probes, challenges, contextualizes — and relishes. Sometimes he notices the quirky, the absurd, the improbable, the outrageous, the stunning. Occasionally, he gapes, astonished. From time to time his heart is warmed by the familiar, the undramatic, the quotidian. In each and every text, he picks the locks of vision. Through multiple modes of seeing, these vignettes and meditations reveals a rich, varied world, brimming with energy and delight.” ~Richard Berengarten, author of Under Balkan Light (2008)
“A. Robert Lee in his new collection of poetry, WRITTEN EYE, shows what an eclectic mind can do when viewing painting, photography, film, sculpture and architecture. Paintings, by such opposed sensibilities as Turner and Rothko are seized upon and given Lee’s genial but loaded commentary. He illuminates just what stands behind the artist and the work in personal anecdotes — with considerable artlessness and often funny too! Unpretentious in style: an authentic voice that we hear vividly on each page.” ~Nicholas R. Williams, Saitama Institute of Technology, Japan
“What a feast for the senses! A. Robert Lee’s verse courageously explores the pinnacles of artistic achievement; the fragments of a whole that kaleidoscope and then coalesce in the mind’s eye. I felt as though I had traveled the globe, a witness to some of the finest spectacle humanity has offered.” ~Jared Baxter, author of On Researching Van Gogh and His Works
“A. Robert Lee’s Written Eye is a wonderful exercise in the ancient art of ekphrasis: the literary re-enactment of a work of art. Lee takes us on a visual journey spanning all the arts — painting, photography, film, sculpture and architecture, pondering and exploring the ways and skills of seeing. His rich language and eye of curiosity makes for his own art history book. These texts are beautiful and full of interest in their own right.“ ~Frida Ingvild Forsgren, professor of Art History University of Agder, Norway
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