Ten Poems about Art

by Geoff Dyer (Editor), Fleur Adcock, Moniza Alvi

Genres: Poetry, Art

24 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2019

About the author

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

Reviews

[Cindy Richard]

This was another enjoyable edition of the brief books published by Candlewick Press. Geoff Dyer pulled together a collection of poets who created ekphrastic poems about famous works of art. I often like to guess at what people are thinking in paintings, and a lot of these poems are told from the perspective of the individual in the painting. The brief introduction also provided insight into why this collection is meaningful to Dyer. These brief collections make lovely gifts for bibliophiles - an alternative to providing a traditional birthday or holiday card.

[Eilleen]

My dtrinlw brought this very, very short compilation to me from Paris.
I let it sit on my bedroom table for weeks and now I just picked it up and began reading - calling the artwork up on my phone as each poem began.
I loved it.

[Julia]

A lovely short and sweet collection, that makes you want to look at art.

[Emma McCleary]

A very enjoyable gift from a colleague that had me looking at art in a new way, and enjoying an alternate view of some old favourites.

[Lesley Potts]

A Christmas gift from my friend, Joy. And yes, it’s a very short book to finish up the 2022 Challenge. However, for all its twenty pages, it is an absolute joy to read. Ten ekphrastic poems, that is poems addressing works of art, some of my favorite, well loved works of art. Vermeer, Breughel, Bonnard, Vuiallard, Hopper, Cezanne, how you feel when leaving the Tate - it’s all there.

[Kate Hendy]

A Birthday present from my sister. Its lovely, I am sorely missing attending Art Galleries and this had poems by some of my favourite Artists. Reading it is like rubbing a balm into a sore place .

[Seher]

I loved this. Honestly though, they should have included the art works. That’s the only thing that could have added to this

[Giulia]

un regalo di apshy da edimburgo ❤️

[Reka]

I loved it so much!!! Really lovely collection of poems are among them. A few of the best contemporary poems I have ever read! <3

[Stephanie]

Bought this for a friend, had to read it myself first. Stunning ❤️