A Gray Realm the Ocean

by Jennifer Atkinson, Patricia Spears Jones (Foreword)

The poems in Jennifer Atkinson’s A Gray Realm the Ocean were all written under the influence of art-specifically twenty-and twenty-first-century abstract visual art. All the art referenced in the poems was done by women. Although many of these painters, sculptors, performance artists, ceramicists, and fabric artists have earned international reputations, albeit late in their lives or even after their deaths, most have only recently been given the notice and gallery space they deserve.

Composed in response to the artists’ multiplicity of forms, styles, modes, and moods, the poems are variously experimental. Drunk on color and language, line and lines, they don’t so much describe the art as revel in it. No patriarchal anxiety here―the poet actively seeks to join in conversation with the artists, listening closely and seeking their influence. She ponders, interrogates, and celebrates the work, taking each artist on her own term―respecting the achieved calm of Agnes Martin’s “Night Sea” and the flare and smolder of Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body” work, the lyric voluptuousness of Joan Mitchell and the intellectual geometries of Carmen Herrera, the arrested explosions of Cornelia Parker and Ruth Asawa’s cool embodiments of shadow, the sun-drenched reveries of Emmi Whitehorse and Pat Steir’s un-skied star falls. Yet A Gray Realm the Ocean not only seeks to honor these artists―their work, their courage, and their curiosity. Taken together, the collection is also a meditation on looking―conscious, attentive looking―and the mysterious nature of abstraction.

94 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2022

About the author

Apart from Drift Ice (Etruscan Press, 2008), Jennifer Atkinson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Dogwood Tree (University of Alabama Press, 1990), which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, and The Drowned City (Northeastern University Press, 2000), winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many leading journals and have been honored with Pushcart Prizes. She taught in Nepal, in Japan, at the University of Iowa, and at Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason University.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The notes detail that Jennifer Atkinson has been moved to write, over several decades, 32 poems on contemporary and pre-postmodern paintings, sculptures, and installations, a long-game in ekphrasis, since the poems document acts of seeing, returning to see, listening, movement in relationship to, probably 23 or so women, a swaggering cull of artists, from Agnes Martin to Emma Whitehorse to Briget Riley and Ann Hamilton and on and on. The volume as a whole amounts to an interrogation of these artists and their ways of seeing, a record of leveling, scaling, making the encounter stick. There's also a poem that imagines what an artist's response to the burning of an African American church in Ferguson (St. Louis) might be. The hopefulness in that is on the level of the hopefulness in letting these artists appropriate for a brief while this medium of verbal topologies.