How to Paint a Dead Man by Harry Bauld

Harry Bauld‘s nimble mind dances through these poems: his words alight on a Basquiat angel, eager to annunciate and be off; they conjure the regrets of a 17th century missionary and the pride of the “lace man” in Rembrandt’s studio; they weave a mass shooting and a father’s death into a single tapestry of grief. When you read these sharply intelligent poems, you revel in Harry Bauld‘s word play—right up to the moment he cuts the parachute cord and you plummet into his wisdom.

–Geraldine Woods, author of 25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way

Harry Bauld is looking so hard at art that he is deliriously incantatory. He demands it take him not only to an elsewhere but to that place where a new world is constructed from the debris of the old. Bauld’s ekphrastic verse immerses the painter’s brush in the poet’s voice to tell of beauty and discontent: “I want to learn to sing with my hands…to the broken distance between us.” From Miles Davis to Magritte, Bauld convenes his heroes with humor and pathos. He has studied the moves of boxers and magicians and How to Paint a Dead Man speaks glorious lyric to our troubled time: “More than a sum sung of pasts, tomorrow is a mortification waiting in an unknown tongue.”

–Desiree Alvarez, author of Devil’s Paintbrush and Raft of Flame

“Always now / it seems we look at art and it looks back / at us on trial,” says Harry Bauld in “The Eyes.” How to Paint a Dead Man cuts a large swath across history—from the 14th century to the 20th, from Cennino Cennini to Jean-Michel Basquiat. All the while, the poems display and explore a proclivity for dichotomies: fame versus obscurity; serenity versus violence; inner versus outer experience, where what’s real and what’s imagined is blurred, or is the same—while he observes or embodies a work of art or its creator, “the ordinary / magic that makes a window / of the darkness and props up / the jaws of the prosperous.” Here, art is born of resistance to what will drag us under, or kill us—and so these poems themselves enact a means of survival and of beauty as they dare to ask the simple question, “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?”

–Meg Kearney, author of Home By Now and An Unkindness of Ravens

Playful and poignant, How to Paint a Dead Man delights in language and the details of life, with an undercurrent of mortality and pulsing dread. Bauld’s poems are energetic, nimble, skillfully teasing yet sincere, rich with strangeness and surprise.

–Anna Noyes, author of Goodnight, Beautiful Women