A unique collaboration between a sculptor and a poet: an anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.
Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied in the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats's Grecian urn and Shelley's "Ozymandias" to contemporary verse about Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial and Janet Echelman's wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the materials of the plastic arts--clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more--into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Auden, Lowell, and Plath.