THE POETRY OF HISTORY
My two persistent interests have been history and poetry. So why not combine them?!
In A Wilderness of Riches: Voices of the Virginia Colony, now in a second edition , with expanded notes, history comes alive in first-person narrative poems. The hopes and hardships of the first settlers who sailed to and established the first permanent English-speaking colony on American soil (13 years before the Pilgrims set foot on Cape Cod) which I describe are true-to-life. Their first encounters with the land itself and with the natives who inhabited the area are taken from historical accounts.
Entwining image (in poetry, not just the visual picture but also the physical sensations from any of the five senses) and poetic language (the musical cadence of each line and the repetition of like sounds within words of the same or adjacent lines) with the stories of the real Captain John Smith, the actual Pocahontas (as an adult and not merely the girl of legend) and English women who arrived in the colony as prospectives brides give new energy to dry history.
Combining poetry with art history, as I've done in Frenzy of Color, Reverie of Line: Poems on Vincent van Gogh's Life and Art (also reprinted in a second edition) delivers a tender and piercing portrayal of the artist and his art. The poems are accompanied by reproductions of his drawings and paintings to further engage the reader.
Both are available on Amazon.com.
In A Wilderness of Riches: Voices of the Virginia Colony, now in a second edition , with expanded notes, history comes alive in first-person narrative poems. The hopes and hardships of the first settlers who sailed to and established the first permanent English-speaking colony on American soil (13 years before the Pilgrims set foot on Cape Cod) which I describe are true-to-life. Their first encounters with the land itself and with the natives who inhabited the area are taken from historical accounts.
Entwining image (in poetry, not just the visual picture but also the physical sensations from any of the five senses) and poetic language (the musical cadence of each line and the repetition of like sounds within words of the same or adjacent lines) with the stories of the real Captain John Smith, the actual Pocahontas (as an adult and not merely the girl of legend) and English women who arrived in the colony as prospectives brides give new energy to dry history.
Combining poetry with art history, as I've done in Frenzy of Color, Reverie of Line: Poems on Vincent van Gogh's Life and Art (also reprinted in a second edition) delivers a tender and piercing portrayal of the artist and his art. The poems are accompanied by reproductions of his drawings and paintings to further engage the reader.
Both are available on Amazon.com.
