
Description
Night at the Musée d'Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities is a vibrant memoir of travel poems centering on Wells' appreciation of well-known European painters, architects, writers, and musicians associated with great European cities. Although beauty is Wells' major theme in her poetry collection, she also delves into the darker side of various artists' lives and their works with depth and precision. In conjunction, Wells interweaves her own personal life into her travel poems, which illustrate her creative and emotional responses to her travels at different times in her life-from young adult in France to older woman confronting aging and mortality in Barcelona. Her poetry encompasses various poetic styles-lyric, narrative, and surprisingly for a book on European travels, even haiku.
Night at the Musée d'Orsay contains five sections: The first section, France, highlights artists in Paris-Van Gogh, Chagall, Renoir, Matisse and novelist Balzac. Italy, the second chapter, features poems about Rome, Orvieto, and Assisi, spotlighting contemporary organist Giampaolo Di Rosa in Rome, and Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli in Orvieto. The third section, Austria, contains poems on musicians Amadeus Mozart and his sister Nannerl, the architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and contemporary light artist Victoria Coeln, all in Vienna. The Czech Republic, the fourth chapter, features poems on the Renaissance and baroque city, Český Krumlov, and Franz Kafka in Prague. The final section, Spain, visits the Prado in Madrid with poems on Velázquez and Goya, and ends with a long poem on the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and his still incomplete sacred temple in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familía.
Product Details
Publisher | Regent Press |
Publish Date | January 01, 2023 |
Pages | 118 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781587906404 |
Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.0 X 0.3 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
The first voice we hear in Judy Wells' Night at the Musée d'Orsay is that of a moth who confesses to spending the night in ecstasy on the painted "yellow globs" of Van Gogh's stars, "reflected in a river." This humble, soulful art lover sets the tone for Wells' delightful collection of travel poems. Beauty awes her. She can swing from an ecstatic response to loveliness to an agonized response to suffering. Her contemplation of Matisse's Icarus on a T-shirt is broken by gunfire in Oakland, "and Black Icarus/ lies in a pool of/ brilliant red/ day/ after day." She moves us from laughter to tears.
-Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of The Faust Woman Poems and The Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung
With a perceptive and whimsical wit, Judy Wells takes us on a tour of some of Europe's well-known art, artists, and their histories. Beneath the delightful surface there are glimmers of what might belie art's promise of an immortal world where beauty rules; yet these shadows give an edge to the joie de vivre found on every page here.
-Olivia Eielson, artist and writer
It's a treat to immerse yourself in Wells' poems in Night at the Musée d'Orsay, rich with life, color, and memory. She creates a wraparound mood of discovery, excitation, optimism, and the youthful joy of seeing for the first time those famous paintings, those foreign streets, a civilization freshly seen and intimately embraced.
-Kathleen Weaver, poet, translator, and author of Peruvian Rebel, The World of Magda Portal.
When Wells takes on the persona of the artist, the maker, the creator, in Night at the Musée d'Orsay, she encourages us to believe that anyone can take flight and soar off to new visions in an experiment in time, space, and verbal jouissance that is poetry and life itself! -Bridget Connelly, author of Forgetting Ireland
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