The Visionary Gleam: Texts & Transformations. This item is unavailable.The Visionary Gleam: Texts & Transformations

Poet-painter Elise Asher takes her title from the question asked by William Wordsworth in his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality: "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" In this opulent work of exploration and discovery she juxtaposes 47 color plates of her lumimous paintings with their sources or parallels in the poems of the great tradition. The poets who hunt her imagination and whose lines she inscribes on pages facing the paintings range from Shakespeare, Vaughan, Milton, Blake, and Keats to Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Roethke, and Kunitz. These are poems and paintings that communicate the everlasting mystery of the human experience and that reinforce each other in the search for transcendence. The Visionary Gleam is further enriched by the inclusion of passages from the free-flowing narrative of a transcontinental journey, a distillation of memory and fancy, that is also a journey in time.

ELISE ASHER, born in Chicago, has been living in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts since 1948. The cover for this book is taken from one of her paintings. In 1994 she published, with The Sheep Meadow Press, The Visionary Gleam, a work of exploration and discovery where she juxtaposes forty-seven plates of her paintings with their source or parallels in the poems from the great tradition.