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OverviewThe poems in Jennifer Atkinson's A Gray Realm the Ocean were all written under the influence of art-specifically twenty-and twenty-first-century abstract visual art. All the art referenced in the poems was done by women. Although many of these painters, sculptors, performance artists, ceramicists, and fabric artists have earned international reputations, albeit late in their lives or even after their deaths, most have only recently been given the notice and gallery space they deserve. Composed in response to the artists' multiplicity of forms, styles, modes, and moods, the poems are variously experimental. Drunk on color and language, line and lines, they don't so much describe the art as revel in it. No patriarchal anxiety here-the poet actively seeks to join in conversation with the artists, listening closely and seeking their influence. She ponders, interrogates, and celebrates the work, taking each artist on her own term-respecting the achieved calm of Agnes Martin's ""Night Sea"" and the flare and smolder of Ana Mendieta's ""earth-body"" work, the lyric voluptuousness of Joan Mitchell and the intellectual geometries of Carmen Herrera, the arrested explosions of Cornelia Parker and Ruth Asawa's cool embodiments of shadow, the sun-drenched reveries of Emmi Whitehorse and Pat Steir's un-skied star falls. Yet A Gray Realm the Ocean not only seeks to honor these artists-their work, their courage, and their curiosity. Taken together, the collection is also a meditation on looking-conscious, attentive looking-and the mysterious nature of abstraction. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Jennifer Atkinson , Patricia Spears JonesPublisher: Fordham University Press Imprint: Fordham University Press ISBN: 9781531500894ISBN 10: 1531500897 Pages: 94 Publication Date: 20 September 2022 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsForeword, by Patricia Spears Jones | xi Incognita | 1 Spirit Level | 3 “Night Sea” | 4 Like Somewhere in Saskatchewan | 5 She Would Not Say Her Work is the Work of Turning | 7 “Lemon Tree” | 8 “Milk River” | 9 Sufficing | 10 Abstraction | 11 Reading Nautical Maps | 12 “Mountains and Sea” | 13 “The Bay” | 15 ‘Womb-of-All, Home-of-All, Hearse-of-All Night’ | 17 A Clear Jar | 18 White | 19 “La Grande Vallée XIII” | 21 “Sunflower III” | 23 Sub-Linguistic Mumbling | 24 Interior 1963 | 26 If | 28 Cartography | 30 Show Me an Angel | 31 Star River Night 33 Alma Thomas’s “Orion” Is | 35 “Spiral Leap” | 37 Motion and Cessation | 38 At Sea | 40 Night Forms | 41 Night Vision | 43 “Femme-Maison” | 44 Irascible | 46 The Wall | 47 Fire | 48 After the Burning of Flood Christian Church in Ferguson, MO: An Exploded View | 49 The Melancholy of the Actual World | 51 Why Seek the Dead Among the Living? | 52 ‘It Remains to Be Seen’ | 53 Quick and Still | 54 Seismography | 56 The Coriolis Effect | 58 “Uninvited Collaboration” | 59 Afloat | 60 Whole Cloth | 61 “Cranoch Glen” | 63 Looking | 65 “Character Set” | 67 The Provenance of Color | 69 Black on Black | 70 Sea and Grass | 71 Afterword | 72 Notes | 75 Acknowledgments | 81ReviewsWhen anyone else describing the wind across snow would have told of its noise or its bitter cold, Jennifer Atkinson attends to its fragrance. Again and again in A Gray Realm the Ocean, Atkinson detects the more muted presence informing a scene through which busier presences bluster. Because her attention to experience is lush with her love of experience, Jennifer Atkinson's exquisite poems consistently override / the visible to sound the depths of the felt. ---H. L. Hix, In Jennifer Atkinson's A Gray Realm the Ocean, an 'incognita' figure guides us through a sororal gallery of abstract visual art, donning with what Dickinson called 'Costumeless Consciousness' the work of each of the women makers (Martin, Frankenthaler, Asawa. . . ) to whom these poems pay homage. With peerless lyricism and a uniquely fluid ekphrastic sensibility, Atkinson creates as well a breviary for the imperiled earth, our island home--a world in which word and natural world are inextricably and spiritually connected. Clods of earth exposed when winter rye is turned become a 'source text'; the chalk staves a childhood music teacher sketches on the blackboard evoke the universe's 'skelter, / skit-scatter notes, the quiver / like a twitched flank under horseflies.' As the poems body forth and honor the pieces they 'translate, ' the reader comes to see that by giving a local habitation and a name to the airy nothings of 'abstraction, ' Atkinson, like the artists she celebrates, grapples with our deepest, most ineffable hungers and fears--extinction, beauty, truth, God, meaning, death, and love.---Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems, Lines under, lines over...lines after lines. So poetry goes, so painting. A chalkboard, a mountain, the tideline, an ocean. Look, look again, says Jennifer Atkinson in A Gray Realm the Ocean, a reading experience most worthy of repetition. 'Is it life catching up with form? Or vice versa' I don't know, or I didn't, but what carried me through felt beautifully infinitesimal and larger than life. at once. Again and again, I will return to this cherished book.---Sally Keith, When anyone else describing the wind across snow would have told of its noise or its bitter cold, Jennifer Atkinson attends to its fragrance. Again and again in A Gray Realm the Ocean, Atkinson detects the more muted presence informing a scene through which busier presences bluster. Because her attention to experience is lush with her love of experience, Jennifer Atkinson's exquisite poems consistently override / the visible to sound the depths of the felt. ---H. L. Hix, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Maya Lin, Emmi Whitehorse, and Chakaia Booker are among the visual artists whose stunning work Jennifer Atkinson illuminates in her new book. Still, it is the gorgeous art of the poet herself that will most impress readers of A Gray Realm the Ocean. With the perspective of someone at home in that realm--'calm in the vastness, dreamin'""--Atkinson sings to us from the deep, meditating on 'the visible to sound the depths of the felt.'---Allison Funk, author of The Visible Woman In this vigorous collection of tight yet sweeping lyric constructions, Atkinson continually turns our attention toward the work of a number of important women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. And through this generous act of homage to figures such as Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, and Emmi Whitehorse, she also implicitly points to the important poetic oeuvre created by women during the same period by creating her own in the form of poems whose intricate webs juggle the concrete with the suggestive, the provocative with the pensive. And above all, rises her sound--Atkinson has an orchestral gift; somehow both delicate and dense, it's an art that allows language to transcend meaning, and she is its consummate practitioner.---Cole Swenson In Jennifer Atkinson's A Gray Realm the Ocean, an 'incognita' figure guides us through a sororal gallery of abstract visual art, donning with what Dickinson called 'Costumeless Consciousness' the work of each of the women makers (Martin, Frankenthaler, Asawa. . . ) to whom these poems pay homage. With peerless lyricism and a uniquely fluid ekphrastic sensibility, Atkinson creates as well a breviary for the imperiled earth, our island home--a world in which word and natural world are inextricably and spiritually connected. Clods of earth exposed when winter rye is turned become a 'source text'; the chalk staves a childhood music teacher sketches on the blackboard evoke the universe's 'skelter, / skit-scatter notes, the quiver / like a twitched flank under horseflies.' As the poems body forth and honor the pieces they 'translate, ' the reader comes to see that by giving a local habitation and a name to the airy nothings of 'abstraction, ' Atkinson, like the artists she celebrates, grapples with our deepest, most ineffable hungers and fears--extinction, beauty, truth, God, meaning, death, and love.---Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems Lines under, lines over...lines after lines. So poetry goes, so painting. A chalkboard, a mountain, the tideline, an ocean. Look, look again, says Jennifer Atkinson in A Gray Realm the Ocean, a reading experience most worthy of repetition. 'Is it life catching up with form? Or vice versa' I don't know, or I didn't, but what carried me through felt beautifully infinitesimal and larger than life. at once. Again and again, I will return to this cherished book.---Sally Keith When anyone else describing the wind across snow would have told of its noise or its bitter cold, Jennifer Atkinson attends to its fragrance. Again and again in A Gray Realm the Ocean, Atkinson detects the more muted presence informing a scene through which busier presences bluster. Because her attention to experience is lush with her love of experience, Jennifer Atkinson's exquisite poems consistently ""override / the visible to sound the depths of the felt.""---H. L. Hix Author InformationJennifer Atkinson (Author) Jennifer Atkinson published five books of poetry before A Gray Realm the Ocean, most recently The Thinking Eye and Canticle of the Night Path, both from Free Verse Editions/ Parlor Press. She is recently retired from George Mason University, where she taught in the MFA and BFA programs in Poetry Writing. She lives in northern Virginia. Patricia Spears Jones (Foreword By) Patricia Spears Jones is the author of five books of poetry, including Painkiller, Femme du Monde, and The Weather That Kills. Her work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and Best American Poetry. She has taught at LaGuardia Community College and Queens College CCNY, Parsons, The New School, and the College of New Rochelle. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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