Beholding Eye

by Grace Bauer

A book of poems

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published June 1, 2006

About the author

A native of Pennsylvania, Grace Bauer has also lived in New Orleans, Montana, Massachusetts, Virginia, and now in Lincoln, NE, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Reviews

[Grace Mattern · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grace Bauer's collection of ekphrastic poems goes beyond the usual expressions of that genre -- poems in response to paintings or works of visual art. In this outstanding book, Bauer begins with poems directly connected to specific paintings or painters, always providing fresh insight. She then devotes an entire section to responses to Marcel Duchamp, exploring not only his painting but his approach to art, including creating poems from random selections of his writings, as Duchamp used random images for his well known "readymades." The final section, a collection of poems inspired by Cindy Sherman's self portraits, provide sharp and witty portraits of women in various modes of being, from "On LSD at Sunset Pier She Thinks of Wallace Stevens" to her "Steady Date with Sorrow" to the woman in "Her Red Dress" who finds "Only what hangs in that heat/is every dress she has ever owned./Every dress she has ever/taken off for a man." These poems not only help you see or understand paintings in new ways, they place you in the creative world, "an idea intended to change/forever how we see." This volume is "An Epic of the Eyes," as the first section is called. What more could you ask from a book of poetry, from any book?