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We thought we knew the faces of these twenty five great poets, smiling serenely from the dust jackets of their books, but in Neta Goren’s portraits we seem to look straight into each psyche, as if privy to the inexorable tensions and darkly radiant energies that gave rise to the poetry. Twenty five great poets, and twenty five brilliant readings by Shahar Bram, whose virtuoso lyric crystallizations take us straight into the vital core of each poet’s oeuvre. Their book is the best kind of homage that art can pay to art: a dialogue of deeply felt, genuine invention.
George Kalogeris, poet and translator, author of CAMUS: Carnets; Dialogos; and Guide to Greece. |
These poems and paintings working together create their own imaginative space, a realm unto itself, one that is alive with aesthetic dialogue, sincere homage, and heartfelt beauty.
Fred Marchant, poet, author of The Looking House, Full Moon Boat, and Said Not Said |
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A collaboration between a poet and a painter, Colorful Was Their Voice pays tribute to American poetry in word and color portraiture. It is the outcome of a dialogue in which ideas and thoughts continuously shift between the visual and the verbal. The dialogue continues in the book: the eye moves back and forth between a brush stroke and a line, an idiom and a contour of a body, between a figure of speech and the figure in color.
The poems and paintings relate to each other in diverse ways, rival each other and complete one another. They compete yet harmonize, hinting thus in myriad ways to the life and work of each poet, bringing to life a visual and textual portrait of twenty-five American masters Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman to name a few. |