Arts & Letters & Love

Arts & Letters & Love works magic: these poems add new dimensions of lyricism and wit to existing works of art, with figurative language that stops you in your tracks. Jean Kreiling brings the visual arts to life, noting that Van Gogh's shoes "reek of years, kilometers, and clues to climate." Her affection for literature percolates through poems like her brilliant sonnet about-and worthy of-Edna St. Vincent Millay. In her observations on music, notes become kites, or "strands precisely stitched," or marriage partners "on tangled paths." One sonnet makes an assertion that is true of these poems themselves: "This music plays the ear." -Deborah Warren Whether they address paintings, music, or literature, Jean Kreiling's ekphrastic poems read as absorbing colloquies with works of art. She beautifully shapes her language to her subjects: spare precision for a Hopper, gentle charm for a Cassatt, something more darkly portentous for Delacroix, a nice bit of bathos for Satie, and forthright passion for C sar Frank's Symphony. Whatever her subject, the frisson of aesthetic pleasure is palpably conveyed. The book's tour de force is the series of poems on Stravinsky's Pulcinella, which is, like the piece it evokes, both cleverly delightful and delightfully clever throughout. -Dick Davis Jean Kreiling's Arts & Letters & Love focuses cohesively on the ways high art can touch our middle-to-lowbrow lives. The collection is packed with Kreiling's effortlessly musical sonnets-my favorite is "A Thousand Clerks"-but shows off her facility with forms of every kind. That skill allows meter and rhyme to produce their happiest effect: making our senses "reverberate like living bells." -Maryann Corbett