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Art meets poetry in Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
By Dr. Jim Hills
Contributing Writer
“The Color of Light” is Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s fourth book of poetry, the third in her series of what the writer of the comments on the book’s dustcover calls “eloquent poetic mediations” on great paintings by Dutch artists.
Her first two collections responded to works by Vermeer and Rembrandt; this volume is composed of 21 poems engaging 20 paintings of Van Gogh, including some of his best known – “Irises,” “The Starry Night,” “Wheatfield with Crows,” – all done between 1887 and his death by suicide in 1890. Prints of the paintings appear on the left-facing pages of this small book, corresponding poems on the right.
These free verse poems reward the reader on a number of important levels: they direct our eye to see the paintings themselves – the shapes and colors, the objects rendered, and their relationships to one another – guide us, that is, in a “reading” of the painting.
Too, the language is a delight, replete with restrained but rich music. Say aloud, for example, these lines from “Van Gogh’s Bedroom”: “…if your pillows are yellow, you will not/ forget how sun lit the tips of grass/ like candles and made long fingers/ of light in the roadway.”
But, beyond that, the poems, coupled with the paintings, invite us to enter a world of intensified awareness. More accurately, they insist on it.
Here is what the poet says in her brief but remarkable introduction (do not skip past it): “We are called by the Light into the light we can’t yet bear without the shades and protections of mud, mortar, wood, canvas, and color. Art is a form of mercy that meets us where we are with what is hospitable and familiar, made only a little strange to stretch us toward what can’t be seen with the naked eye or fully understood, but recognized and claimed if we assent to what is offered.
“The poems in this volume … are my acts of assent.”
“The Color of Light” is published by Eerdmans and can be ordered through the Corban bookstore. Here’s a suggestion: skip one pizza, and use the money to buy this book. Read it slowly. Read it again. Add it to the list of books you will take with you when you move.
