About the Book
Poems About Sculpture is a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form.
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, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers of all kinds.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by Robert Pinsky
Introduction by Murray Dewart
THE GODS
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Archaic Torso of Apollo
ROBERT PINSKY, Genesis According to George Segal
ISAIAH, “What likeness will you find for God”
EMILY DICKINSON, Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
DENISE LEVERTOV, Art
LAURA RIDING, Incarnations
ROBERT BLY, Chinese Tomb Guardians
DANA GIOIA, The Angel with the Broken Wing
CLAUDE MCKAY, Russian Cathedral
RUMI, The Ruins of the Heart
HENRIETTA CORDELIA RAY, The Tireless Sculptor
H. D., Adonis
DYLAN THOMAS, from Prologue to the Collected Poems
WILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger
JACK GILBERT, Measuring the Tyger
ROBERT PINSKY, The Ghost Hammer
BASIL BUNTING, See! Their verses are laid
JOHN UPDIKE, Mobile of Birds
ELEANOR WILNER, Changing the Imperatives
KENNETH KOCH, Aesthetics of Stone
GEORGE HERBERT, Church-Monuments
WALTER DE LA MARE, The Stranger
ROSALYN DRISCOLL, Magdalene
GEOFFREY HILL, In Piam Memorium
JORIE GRAHAM, Pieta
RUDYARD KIPLING, Buddha at Kamakura 1892
THOMAS MERTON, Buddha Figures in Ceylon
KATHA POLLITT, Archaeology
DONALD HALL, On A Horse Carved in Wood
MARIANNE MOORE, I Tell You No Lie
TYEHIMBA JESS, Hagar in the Wilderness
LOVE AND THE BODY
JOHN KEATS, Ode on a Grecian Urn
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Creating for Always
PHILIP LARKIN, An Arundel Tomb
W. B. YEATS, Sailing To Byzantium
SHARON OLDS, The Urn
JENNY HOLZER, Lamentations
C. K. WILLIAMS, Lost Wax
TERRANCE HAYES, from Arbor for Butch
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, A Sculptor
ADRIENNE RICH, Gerit Achterberg Statue
ROBERT GRAVES, Pygmalion to Galatea
DANTE MICHEAUX, Torso
ISAIAH, “The blacksmith sharpens a graving tool”
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, The Lover and the Sculptor
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave”
CAROL ANN DUFFY, Pygmalion’s Bride
MARIANNE MOORE, Rodin’s Penseur
JON DAVIS, The Invention of Ecstasy
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments”
OVID, Orpheus Song: Pygmalion
WARFARE
VIRGIL, from The Aeneid
HOMER, The Shield of Achilles
SEAMUS HEANEY, In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
MARY SZYBIST, Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
POSIDIPPOS, On Alexander, Portrayed in Bronze
NATASHA TRETHAWEY, Elegy for the Native Guards
NIKKI GIOVANNI, But Since You Finally Asked
ROBERT LOWELL, For the Union Dead
W. S. MERWIN, The War
W. H. AUDEN, The Shield of Achilles
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, Facing It
MONUMENTS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea”
JOHN MILTON, On Shakespear, 1630
WALLACE STEVENS, Anecdote of the Jar
BERNADETTE MAYER, Earthworks
WILLIAM STAFFORD, At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border
SAMUEL WESLEY, The Monument
ANONYMOUS, On the Setting Up Mr. Butler’s Monument in Westminster Abbey
ROBERT HERRICK, Pillar of Fame
CECILA VICUNA, Inkamisana
OSCAR WILDE, The Artist
PETER DAVISON, The Swordless Statue
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, To Inez Milholland
OBJECTS AND APPARITIONS
OCTAVIO PAZ, Objects & Apparitions
W. B. YEATS, Lapis Lazuli
MARGO LOCKWOOD, Blue Willow
DEBORA KUAN, Pastoral
HOWARD NEMEROV, from Ozymandias II
WALT WHITMAN, To a Locomotive in Winter
GARY SNYDER, Removing the Plate of the Pump on the Hydraulic System of a Backhoe
MOLLY BENDELL, Conversation with Eva Hesse
SYLVIA PLATH, Sculptor
EILEEN TABIOS, The Wire Sculpture
JOSEPH BRODSKY, A Footnote to Weather Forecasts
JOHN UPDIKE, Calder’s Hands
JONATHAN SWIFT, Shall I Repine?
JEAN ARP, In Flesh and Blood
LOUISE BOGAN, Statue and Birds
NATHANIEL MACKEY, Double Staccato
ROSAMOND ZIMMERMAN, Incomplete Open Cube
JULIA RANDALL, Sculptor
HARRIS BARRON, Brancusi’s Song
MINA LOY, Brancusi’s Golden Bird
ROBERT HAYDEN, Richard Hunt’s “Arachne”
RACHEL HADAS, Vermont Pilgrim in Granite and Bronze
JULIA RANDALL, For Henry Moore
MARIANNE MOORE, Is Your Town Nineveh?
WALLACE STEVENS, The Snow Man
HOWARD NEMEROV, Journey of the Snowmen
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Snow-Storm
ROBERT HAAS, Museum
STEPHEN SANDY, Christo’s Fence
ROBERT PINSKY, The Sky Sculpture
ANTIQUITY
RAINER MARIA RILKE, In Rome
JOHN KEATS, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of Keats
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Ozymandias
MAY SWENSON, Fountains of Aix
RICHARD ALDINGTON, To a Greek Marble
W. B. YEATS, Men Improve with the Years
WILLIAM BRONK, The Beautiful Wall, Machu Picchu
HERMAN MELVILLE, Puzzlement
EDMUND SPENSER, from The Ruins of Time
HORACE SMITH, On a Stupendous Leg of Granite Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt
MARK DOTY, Apparition (Favorite Poem)
POSIDIPPUS, Three Poems
BILLY COLLINS, Greek and Roman Statuary
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, To Giovanni da Pistoia When Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, A Greek Statue
EMMA LAZARUS, The New Colossus
ELLA HIGGINSON, The Statue
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Michel Angelo in Reply to the Passage Upon His Statue of Night
JACK GILBERT, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
RICHARD WILBUR, A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra
JOSEPH BRODSKY, Porta San Pancrazio
AMY LOWELL, The Broken Fountain
LOUISE GLUCK, Tributaries
JAMES WRIGHT, Reading a 1979 Inscription on Belli’s Monument
CHARLES BAUDELARIE, Beauty
ROSANNA WARREN, Funerary Portraits
DEREK WALCOTT, From this Far
ROBERT PINSKY, The Figured Wheel
W. B. YEATS, Byzantium
About the Author :
MURRAY DEWART is 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 Inferno.
