Description
Sighted Stones
by Sarah Mead Wyman
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-560-5
2018
Sarah Mead Wyman writes poetry from the Hudson Valley but remembers the rocky jetty where the words were sand.
Sighted Stones by Sarah Mead Wyman
$14.99
Throughout Sighted Stones, poet Sarah Wyman explores both the artistic and natural worlds to evoke the essence of human experience and our relationships with each other, the world around us and the cosmos beyond. She conjures up the spirits of artists Diebenkorn, Gorky and Braque among others to create ekphrastic meditations then turns a 180 with images of spiders, fishbones and repo men. Deeply reflective yet accessible, the volume will remain a presence to readers.
–Laurence Carr, author of Threnodies: poems in remembrance and Pancake Hollow Primer, winner of a Next Generation Indy Book Award.
With the ken of a curator, Sighted Stones offers us sly, lyric ekphrasis. Wyman’s keen eye and violent concision pleasure the reader with fierce focus; her intelligent heart will teach you to look anew at Braque, at Diebenkorn, at Athena — her teacup is a window, her sun a crisp punch.
–Lori Anderson Moseman, author of Flash Mob, All Steel, and Temporary Bunk.
Sarah Wyman’s beautiful poems inhabit the rich shared ground between thoughtful, intimate conversation and a precise, rich lyricism. They interrogate experience, and artworks, and artworks-as-experience. They offer perceptive character studies—a sailor, a woman turned mermaid, a boy-survivor of a great storm. They show us how colors seep and how knowledge of the world can generate a deeper knowing. Their sonic music will catch your ear; their self-interrogating wisdom will bring you back to read them again, again.
–Jeanne Larsen, author of Why We Make Gardens [& Other Poems].
Janet Kozachek –
This small volume of poetry is ethereal, sublime, and moving. Insight that gives equal weight to high art and modest nature is rare. The language in these ekphrastic works, paints the textures, colors and content in an almost visceral experience of the visual art. It is every artist’s hope to have their work so exquisitely honored by time and intelligence in literary works such as this one, which generates art from art. There is something deeply satisfying in joining this writer as she glides over, around, and within an art work. Then, in a surprise turn, this poet turns towards such mundane things as the frantic journey of a toad across a roadway, finding, like Gorky, a certain anxious sympathy in the dramas of our fellow creatures. With this clever, poetic sleight of hand, the writer gives us permission to acknowledge the effects of the minutiae in life on our consciousness.
Even the concise biography is this book satisfies. How can one not find it endearing that all of these insights emanate from the solitude of a tree house in a back yard?