{"product_id":"poems-about-sculpture-isbn-9781101907757","title":"Poems About Sculpture","description":"\u003ci\u003ePoems About Sculpture \u003c\/i\u003eis a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats’s Grecian urn and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to contemporary verse about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman’s wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts—clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more—into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, \u003ci\u003ePoems About Sculpture \u003c\/i\u003eis a treat for art lovers of all kinds.Foreword by Robert Pinsky\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction by Murray Dewart\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTHE GODS \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRAINER MARIA RILKE, Archaic Torso of Apollo\u003cbr\u003eROBERT PINSKY, Genesis According to George Segal\u003cbr\u003eISAIAH, “What likeness will you find for God”\u003cbr\u003eEMILY DICKINSON, Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?\u003cbr\u003eDENISE LEVERTOV, Art \u003cbr\u003eLAURA RIDING, Incarnations \u003cbr\u003eROBERT BLY, Chinese Tomb Guardians \u003cbr\u003eDANA GIOIA, The Angel with the Broken Wing \u003cbr\u003eCLAUDE MCKAY, Russian Cathedral \u003cbr\u003eRUMI, The Ruins of the Heart \u003cbr\u003eHENRIETTA CORDELIA RAY, The Tireless Sculptor \u003cbr\u003eH. D., Adonis \u003cbr\u003eDYLAN THOMAS, from Prologue to the \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger \u003cbr\u003eJACK GILBERT, Measuring the Tyger \u003cbr\u003eROBERT PINSKY, The Ghost Hammer \u003cbr\u003eBASIL BUNTING, See! Their verses are laid \u003cbr\u003eJOHN UPDIKE, Mobile of Birds \u003cbr\u003eELEANOR WILNER, Changing the Imperatives \u003cbr\u003eKENNETH KOCH, Aesthetics of Stone\u003cbr\u003eGEORGE HERBERT, Church-Monuments \u003cbr\u003eWALTER DE LA MARE, The Stranger\u003cbr\u003eROSALYN DRISCOLL, Magdalene \u003cbr\u003eGEOFFREY HILL, In Piam Memorium \u003cbr\u003eJORIE GRAHAM, Pieta\u003cbr\u003eRUDYARD KIPLING, Buddha at Kamakura 1892 \u003cbr\u003eTHOMAS MERTON, Buddha Figures in Ceylon \u003cbr\u003eKATHA POLLITT, Archaeology \u003cbr\u003eDONALD HALL, On A Horse Carved in Wood \u003cbr\u003eMARIANNE MOORE, I Tell You No Lie \u003cbr\u003eTYEHIMBA JESS, Hagar in the Wilderness \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLOVE AND THE BODY \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJOHN KEATS, Ode on a Grecian Urn \u003cbr\u003eRAINER MARIA RILKE, Creating for Always \u003cbr\u003ePHILIP LARKIN, An Arundel Tomb \u003cbr\u003eW. B. YEATS, Sailing To Byzantium \u003cbr\u003eSHARON OLDS, The Urn \u003cbr\u003eJENNY HOLZER, Lamentations \u003cbr\u003eC. K. WILLIAMS, Lost Wax \u003cbr\u003eTERRANCE HAYES, from Arbor for Butch \u003cbr\u003eELLA WHEELER WILCOX, A Sculptor \u003cbr\u003eADRIENNE RICH, Gerit Achterberg Statue\u003cbr\u003eROBERT GRAVES, Pygmalion to Galatea\u003cbr\u003eDANTE MICHEAUX, Torso \u003cbr\u003eISAIAH, “The blacksmith sharpens a graving tool”\u003cbr\u003eMICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, The Lover and the Sculptor \u003cbr\u003eELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave”\u003cbr\u003eCAROL ANN DUFFY, Pygmalion’s Bride \u003cbr\u003eMARIANNE MOORE, Rodin’s \u003ci\u003ePenseur\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJON DAVIS, The Invention of Ecstasy \u003cbr\u003eWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments”\u003cbr\u003eOVID, Orpheus Song: Pygmalion \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWARFARE \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVIRGIL, from The Aeneid\u003cbr\u003eHOMER, The Shield of Achilles \u003cbr\u003eSEAMUS HEANEY, In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge \u003cbr\u003eMARY SZYBIST, Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc\u003cbr\u003ePOSIDIPPOS, On Alexander, Portrayed in Bronze \u003cbr\u003eNATASHA TRETHAWEY, Elegy for the Native Guards \u003cbr\u003eNIKKI GIOVANNI, But Since You Finally Asked \u003cbr\u003eROBERT LOWELL, For the Union Dead \u003cbr\u003eW. S. MERWIN, The War \u003cbr\u003eW. H. AUDEN, The Shield of Achilles \u003cbr\u003eYUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, Facing It \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMONUMENTS \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea”\u003cbr\u003eJOHN MILTON, On Shakespear, 1630 \u003cbr\u003eWALLACE STEVENS, Anecdote of the Jar \u003cbr\u003eBERNADETTE MAYER, Earthworks \u003cbr\u003eWILLIAM STAFFORD, At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border \u003cbr\u003eSAMUEL WESLEY, The Monument \u003cbr\u003eANONYMOUS, On the Setting Up Mr. Butler’s Monument in Westminster Abbey\u003cbr\u003eROBERT HERRICK, Pillar of Fame \u003cbr\u003eCECILA VICUNA, Inkamisana \u003cbr\u003eOSCAR WILDE, The Artist\u003cbr\u003ePETER DAVISON, The Swordless Statue \u003cbr\u003eEDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, To Inez Milholland \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOBJECTS AND APPARITIONS \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOCTAVIO PAZ, Objects \u0026amp; Apparitions \u003cbr\u003eW. B. YEATS, Lapis Lazuli \u003cbr\u003eMARGO LOCKWOOD, Blue Willow \u003cbr\u003eDEBORA KUAN, Pastoral \u003cbr\u003eHOWARD NEMEROV, from Ozymandias II \u003cbr\u003eWALT WHITMAN, To a Locomotive in Winter \u003cbr\u003eGARY SNYDER, Removing the Plate of the Pump on the Hydraulic System of a Backhoe\u003cbr\u003eMOLLY BENDELL, Conversation with Eva Hesse\u003cbr\u003eSYLVIA PLATH, Sculptor \u003cbr\u003eEILEEN TABIOS, The Wire Sculpture \u003cbr\u003eJOSEPH BRODSKY, A Footnote to Weather Forecasts \u003cbr\u003eJOHN UPDIKE, Calder’s Hands \u003cbr\u003eJONATHAN SWIFT, Shall I Repine? \u003cbr\u003eJEAN ARP, In Flesh and Blood \u003cbr\u003eLOUISE BOGAN, Statue and Birds\u003cbr\u003eNATHANIEL MACKEY, Double Staccato \u003cbr\u003eROSAMOND ZIMMERMAN, Incomplete Open Cube \u003cbr\u003eJULIA RANDALL, Sculptor \u003cbr\u003eHARRIS BARRON, Brancusi’s Song \u003cbr\u003eMINA LOY, Brancusi’s Golden Bird \u003cbr\u003eROBERT HAYDEN, Richard Hunt’s “Arachne” \u003cbr\u003eRACHEL HADAS, Vermont Pilgrim in Granite and Bronze \u003cbr\u003eJULIA RANDALL, For Henry Moore \u003cbr\u003eMARIANNE MOORE, Is Your Town Nineveh? \u003cbr\u003eWALLACE STEVENS, The Snow Man \u003cbr\u003eHOWARD NEMEROV, Journey of the Snowmen \u003cbr\u003eRALPH WALDO EMERSON, Snow-Storm \u003cbr\u003eROBERT HAAS, Museum \u003cbr\u003eSTEPHEN SANDY, Christo’s Fence \u003cbr\u003eROBERT PINSKY, The Sky Sculpture  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eANTIQUITY \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRAINER MARIA RILKE, In Rome \u003cbr\u003eJOHN KEATS, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles \u003cbr\u003ePERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of Keats \u003cbr\u003ePERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Ozymandias \u003cbr\u003eMAY SWENSON, Fountains of Aix \u003cbr\u003eRICHARD ALDINGTON, To a Greek Marble \u003cbr\u003eW. B. YEATS, Men Improve with the Years \u003cbr\u003eWILLIAM BRONK, The Beautiful Wall, Machu Picchu \u003cbr\u003eHERMAN MELVILLE, Puzzlement \u003cbr\u003eEDMUND SPENSER, from The Ruins of Time \u003cbr\u003eHORACE SMITH, On a Stupendous Leg of Granite Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt \u003cbr\u003eMARK DOTY, Apparition (Favorite Poem)\u003cbr\u003ePOSIDIPPUS, Three Poems \u003cbr\u003eBILLY COLLINS, Greek and Roman Statuary\u003cbr\u003eMICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, To Giovanni da Pistoia When Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel \u003cbr\u003eWISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, A Greek Statue \u003cbr\u003eEMMA LAZARUS, The New Colossus \u003cbr\u003eELLA HIGGINSON, The Statue \u003cbr\u003eWILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Michel Angelo in Reply to the Passage Upon His Statue of Night \u003cbr\u003eJACK GILBERT, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart \u003cbr\u003eRICHARD WILBUR, A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra \u003cbr\u003eJOSEPH BRODSKY, Porta San Pancrazio \u003cbr\u003eAMY LOWELL, The Broken Fountain\u003cbr\u003eLOUISE GLUCK, Tributaries \u003cbr\u003eJAMES WRIGHT, Reading a 1979 Inscription on Belli’s Monument \u003cbr\u003eCHARLES BAUDELARIE, Beauty \u003cbr\u003eROSANNA WARREN, Funerary Portraits \u003cbr\u003eDEREK WALCOTT, From this Far\u003cbr\u003eROBERT PINSKY, The Figured Wheel \u003cbr\u003eW. B. YEATS, Byzantium \u003cb\u003eMURRAY DEWART \u003c\/b\u003eis an internationally recognized sculptor who has built large public sculptures in China, Israel, and across the United States. He has work in more than thirty permanent collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The deCordova  Sculpture Park and Museum, Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, and the Museum of San Marco University in Lima, Peru. ROBERT PINSKY, former poet laureate of the United States, is the author of nineteen books, including an acclaimed translation of Dante's \u003ci\u003eInferno\u003c\/i\u003e.FOREWORD \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThis book is a good idea, executed with verve: by joining two arts, it invites fresh consideration of art itself. What has an art made of breath to do with an art made of matter? These lines by William Shakespeare suggest an answer, by concentrating on Time: \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eO how shall summer’s honey breath hold out \u003cbr\u003eAgainst the wrackful siege of batt’ring days, \u003cbr\u003eWhen rocks impregnable are not so stout, \u003cbr\u003eNor gates of steel so strong but Time decays? \u003cbr\u003e(Sonnet 65) \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eTime registers movement as well as decay, sweetness as well as battering. In the dimension of time the unfolding vocal breath of a poem transpires; and also in the dimension of time the presence of a sculpture can appear in the round. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eVariety rules here. Murray Dewart’s choices range beyond any duality of rock and steel on one side, ‘‘honey breath’’ on the other. Rhythms of confirmation and surprise, classic expectation and eccentric surprise, enliven this variously populated book. The context of sculpture gives a renewed sense to Yeats’s audacious vision of his soul’s embodiment in “Sailing to Byzantium”: \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eOnce out of nature I shall never take \u003cbr\u003eMy bodily form from any natural thing, \u003cbr\u003eBut such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make \u003cbr\u003eOf hammered gold and gold enamelling \u003cbr\u003eTo keep a drowsy Emperor awake; \u003cbr\u003eOr set upon a golden bough to sing \u003cbr\u003eTo lords and ladies of Byzantium \u003cbr\u003eOf what is past, or passing, or to come.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eHe not only imagines himself inhabiting an artifact, but also the vision is made the more peculiar by the object’s nature: small, ornamental, mechanical rather than natural. The bird, a piece of representational, kinetic sculpture, is also expressive. In the concluding line, the imagined work of art encompasses a sweeping, possibly enduring vision of past, present and future: Time comprehended. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBy contrast, Sharon Olds’s “The Urn” offers a different account of an artifact – personal rather than heroic, actual rather than visionary – and is bold in something like an opposite way to “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here the poet alertly considers an actual, contemporary container for funerary ashes: \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eI had thought it would be tapered, with a small \u003cbr\u003ewaist and a pair of handles, silver-\u003cbr\u003eplated, like a loving cup \u003cbr\u003eor tennis trophy, but there on the table \u003cbr\u003ewas a smooth, square box, with a military \u003cbr\u003elook, the stainless steel corners \u003cbr\u003esoldered up, a container that could bury \u003cbr\u003eradium waste. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe object she does not see, but expected, is described in a little more detail than the “smooth, square box” itself. In art, vision engages presence, but is not bound by it. Like Yeats’s bird, Olds’s poem exemplifies what might be called sculptural imagination. Both poems – and Shakespeare’s sonnet 65 too – consider shaped metal (or more precisely, the idea of shaped metal) in relation to death and afterlife.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eShelley’s “Ozymandias” is an inevitable choice for this book, being possibly the best-known poem in English about a statue. The sonnet indelibly presents the ruined statue’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone” separated in the desert sand from the head’s “shatter’d visage” with its “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.” But it is here further illuminated by the inclusion of another poem on that same statue of Ozymandias: Horace Smith’s sonnet written as part of a friendly competition with his friend Shelley in 1818. Smith’s poem is good, and its comic sense – with a singular Leg and its initial capital – sharpens our sense of the sardonic in Shelley’s poem. Smith’s first eight lines make a point similar to Shelley’s, Time’s mockery of boastful grandeur: \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, \u003cbr\u003eStands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws, \u003cbr\u003eThe only shadow that the desert knows: – \u003cbr\u003e‘‘I am the great Ozymandias,’’ saith the stone. \u003cbr\u003e‘‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows \u003cbr\u003eThe wonders of my hand. – The City’s gone, – \u003cbr\u003eNought but the Leg remaining to disclose \u003cbr\u003eThe site of this forgotten Babylon. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBut Smith’s final six lines extend the temporal imagination in an innovative way, almost in the spirit of science fiction:\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWe wonder, – and some Hunter may express \u003cbr\u003eWonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness \u003cbr\u003eWhere London stood, holding the wolf in chace, \u003cbr\u003eHe meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess \u003cbr\u003eWhat powerful but unrecorded race \u003cbr\u003eOnce dwelt in that annihilated place. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe two friends based their parallel poems on a Greek historian’s description: imagining the statue of Ozymandias, reading about the statue in that passage as part of their game, but not observing it. Admirably inventive, Smith’s poem extends the annihilation to a remote future in which London is covered by wilderness, an explicit obliteration that is implicit in Shelley’s image of dissolution – “the lone and level sands stretch far away.” \u003cbr\u003eThese few examples are intended to suggest the large, gloriously idiosyncratic scope of wonder to be found in this anthology. The editor gives the last word to Yeats and the tireless artistry he attributes to the smithies of Byzantium where images are forged that continually proliferate and extend. Time is regenerative as well as destructive, and in a single process, violently creative, \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e. . . The smithies break the flood, \u003cbr\u003eThe golden smithies of the Emperor! \u003cbr\u003eMarbles of the dancing floor \u003cbr\u003eBreak bitter furies of complexity, \u003cbr\u003eThose images that yet \u003cbr\u003eFresh images beget, \u003cbr\u003eThat dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e --Robert Pinsky ","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300855533797,"sku":"NP9781101907757","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781101907757.jpg?v=1767734908","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/poems-about-sculpture-isbn-9781101907757","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}