Michelangelo's Seizure (National Poetry Series) - Softcover

Gehrke, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252074203 ISBN 13: 9780252074202

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2007

Synopsis

Providing poetic entry into the visual arts

In Michelangelo's Seizure, Steve Gehrke seizes the lives of several classic and contemporary painters--from Caravaggio and Magritte to Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock--to demonstrate how these artists transformed physical, psychological, and political suffering into art. Mirroring the brushstrokes in long, metaphor-laden sentences, Gehrke moves freely through the canvas, into and out of the artists' lives, into the public realm, into history, to capture the way the creative mind can transform even the most violent surroundings--a prison cell, a battlefield, a madhouse--into a masterpiece

About this title

About the Author:

Steve Gehrke lives in South Orange, New Jersey, and teaches at Seton Hall University. His first book, The Resurrection Machine, won the 1999 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, and his second, The Pyramids of Malpighi, won the 2002 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. He was also recipient of the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for the best poem of 2004, The Burning of Parliament, 1834, which is included in this volume.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

with the witchcraft hushed inside his veins,
onto the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew, crumpled, fierce,
with two dead bugs crushed into the paint, like that bit of
terror, he would think, sealed inside of everything He makes.
--From the title poem Michelangelo's Seizure

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0252074203
• ISBN 13: 9780252074202
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88