See Saw

by Adrian Buckner

In these graceful and piercing poems, Adrian Buckner shows how ekphrasis is an act of reading. This is reading not only of the motifs of the pictures but also of the act of painting itself. The paintings that Buckner chooses reflect the whole range of human experience from the sickening threat of Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders to the lovely pastel containments of Giorgio Morandi's Still Life from 1960. Like his poems about the dialogue across the centuries between Leonardo da Vinci and Mark Rothko, this whole pamphlet is a conversation with the artists, their paintings and the ways we might view and read them. It is a beautiful addition to the poetry of ekphrasis written in Buckner's characteristically warm and elegant style. Ian Pople