Unveiling: Poems and Paintings

by Robert Hershon, Elizabeth Hershon (Artist)

Renown Brooklyn poet's last poems in collaboration with his daughter's paintings "UNVEILING" is a poet and painter collaboration in the New York School tradition. Twenty poems by acclaimed Brooklyn poet Robert Hershon alternating with sixteen paintings by his daughter Elizabeth Hershon, a painter, ceramicist, and poet. Bob Hershon was one of four co-founders of Hanging Loose in 1966; he remained active with the press until his death in 2021. A widely published poet himself and a native Brooklynite, he was part of New York City's poetry scene for more than a half-century. The poems included in this volume include all of his last written work. Bob Hershon also maintained a close connection with the New York art world, counting many painters among his friends. Elizabeth Hershon, Bob's daughter, is a teacher, and the art editor of Hanging Loose. She lives in the East Village, but grew up in Brooklyn. Bob approached her in 2020 with the idea of doing a book her paintings and his poems. The result is UNVEILING. Poetry. Art.

Genres: Poetry

54 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2023

About the author

Robert Hershon, born and raised in Brooklyn, is a poet and the author of twelve books. His most recent book is Calls from the Outside World.

He has published twelve books of poetry. Most recently, Into the Punch Line: Poems 1984-1994 (1994), The German Lunatic (2000), and Calls from the Outside World (2006). His work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, the World, Michigan Quarterly, Ploughshares, and The Nation, among many others.

He is also the recipient of various awards, including two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He works as the executive director of the Print Center and as a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press and Hanging Loose magazine in Brooklyn, NY. He has edited various collections, including Smart Like Me and Shooting the Rat, collections of High School writing.

He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife Donna Brook.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Robert Hershon. I miss him. I honor him. And he writes poems like no one else (even now, 3 years after his death, it doesn't seem right to refer to him in the past tense). I'm thinking (although I don't know) that he wrote most of these poems when he was ill. There are references to hospitals and transfusions. But, typically, there is nothing maudlin or sentimental. This poet faces his own death, the way he faced life, finding the peculiar in the every day, finding joy in it, occasionally slightly frightening weirdness. But his exuberance seemed to overcome everything.

For instance, there's a poem here, called "There are People Who I Know Are Dead," which is essentially a poem about the vast amount of dead people who collect around us as we age.

Dead people in the closet
wearing my shoes
Dead people on the kitchen floor
sprinkled with bread crumbs

And the poem ends with an image that seems as if it might reach toward symbolism, until the very last line deflates the whole thing!

The white horse standing still at
the end of the beach near Big Sur
at dawn, sixty years ago
That horse roams
through the house all night
a red eye, a flash of mane
That horse will never die
but it lacks the gift of conversation

The paintings in this book are by Bob's daughter Elizabeth. They are watercolors, so some have exuberant colors in them. But these watercolors have the subdued feel of paints made from natural objects. And each painting has a dark cast to it, a dark corner, or perhaps a dark veil. There is the figure of a woman in many/most of them. Occasionally her features are defined, but mostly she is blank faced, ghost like. Haunting, even as she feels beautiful. At one point the painter writes a note to her poet father where she says "our work does not have that much in common," but the contrast is itself illuminating. It makes for a very satisfying small collection.