Sunlight on the River: Poems about Paintings,Poems about Paintings, Paintings about Poems - Hardcover

-[T]here are so many unexpected delights: a six line poem by Wislawa Szymborska on Vermeer's The Milkmaid is both austere and joyfully optimistic. Anne Sexton's quietly screaming riffs on mortality connect with intimate passion to Van Gogh's The Starry Night.- --Art Quarterly

The poet and the artist share a special kind of vision-an ability to see and penetrate the very essence of their subjects. This volume features poems by writers who turned to paintings for their inspiration, as well as paintings by artists who based their works on poems. Stretching across centuries and styles, this collection includes Rossetti's haunting sonnet based on Botticelli's Primavera; Wallace Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar," a masterful meditation on an iconic painting by Picasso; William Carlos Williams's joyous interpretations of scenes by Breughel; and Adrienne Rich lending a compassionate voice to the subject of Edwin Romanzo Elmer's The Mourning Chair. These and other pairings appear as elegant texts facing full page, glowing illustrations of the paintings. An introduction to some of the greatest poets and painters in history, this remarkable book makes a perfect gift, offering compelling insights into the worlds of art and literature, and the relationship between the two.