Visual and Poetic Motion

In Visual and Poetic Motion, text gathers around the poet's favorite artworks like wide-eyed children around a primordial campfire. Ranging from Baroque, Impressionist, and Surrealist paintings to twenty-first-century photography and graffiti art, these visual works are consumed and then given back to us as poetic meditations. "Taste becomes divine devouring," the poet tells us, licking the paint from his fingertips. It is a process of craving, hunger, and transformation. The tradition of ekphrastic poetry-poems that take direct inspiration from visual art-is one that goes back as far as Homer's The Iliad and Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In this collection that pairs poems with fine art, Aaron Berk confidently joins in this centuries-long conversation between artists both verbal and visual.