A GRAY REALM THE OCEAN
Selected by Patricia Spears Jones
The poems in Jennifer Atkinson’s A Gray Realm the Ocean were all written under the influence of art-specifically twenty-and twenty-first-century abstract visual art. All the art referenced in the poems was done by women. Although many of these painters, sculptors, performance artists, ceramicists, and fabric artists have earned international reputations, albeit late in their lives or even after their deaths, most have only recently been given the notice and gallery space they deserve.
Composed in response to the artists’ multiplicity of forms, styles, modes, and moods, the poems are variously experimental. Drunk on color and language, line and lines, they don’t so much describe the art as revel in it. No patriarchal anxiety here—the poet actively seeks to join in conversation with the artists, listening closely and seeking their influence. She ponders, interrogates, and celebrates the work, taking each artist on her own term—respecting the achieved calm of Agnes Martin’s “Night Sea” and the flare and smolder of Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body” work, the lyric voluptuousness of Joan Mitchell and the intellectual geometries of Carmen Herrera, the arrested explosions of Cornelia Parker and Ruth Asawa’s cool embodiments of shadow, the sun-drenched reveries of Emmi Whitehorse and Pat Steir’s un-skied star falls. Yet A Gray Realm the Ocean not only seeks to honor these artists—their work, their courage, and their curiosity. Taken together, the collection is also a meditation on looking—conscious, attentive looking—and the mysterious nature of abstraction.
When anyone else describing the wind across snow would have told of its noise or its bitter cold, Jennifer Atkinson attends to its fragrance. Again and again in A Gray Realm the Ocean, Atkinson detects the more muted presence informing a scene through which busier presences bluster. Because her attention to experience is lush with her love of experience, Jennifer Atkinson’s exquisite poems consistently “override / the visible to sound the depths of the felt.”---H. L. Hix
Lines under, lines over...lines after lines. So poetry goes, so painting. A chalkboard, a mountain, the tideline, an ocean. Look, look again, says Jennifer Atkinson in A Gray Realm the Ocean, a reading experience most worthy of repetition. 'Is it life catching up with form? Or vice versa' I don’t know, or I didn’t, but what carried me through felt beautifully infinitesimal and larger than life. at once. Again and again, I will return to this cherished book.---Sally Keith
In Jennifer Atkinson’s A Gray Realm the Ocean, an 'incognita' figure guides us through a sororal gallery of abstract visual art, donning with what Dickinson called 'Costumeless Consciousness' the work of each of the women makers (Martin, Frankenthaler, Asawa. . . ) to whom these poems pay homage. With peerless lyricism and a uniquely fluid ekphrastic sensibility, Atkinson creates as well a breviary for the imperiled earth, our island home—a world in which word and natural world are inextricably and spiritually connected. Clods of earth exposed when winter rye is turned become a 'source text'; the chalk staves a childhood music teacher sketches on the blackboard evoke the universe’s 'skelter, / skit-scatter notes, the quiver / like a twitched flank under horseflies.' As the poems body forth and honor the pieces they 'translate,' the reader comes to see that by giving a local habitation and a name to the airy nothings of 'abstraction,' Atkinson, like the artists she celebrates, grapples with our deepest, most ineffable hungers and fears—extinction, beauty, truth, God, meaning, death, and love.---Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems
Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Maya Lin, Emmi Whitehorse, and Chakaia Booker are among the visual artists whose stunning work Jennifer Atkinson illuminates in her new book. Still, it is the gorgeous art of the poet herself that will most impress readers of A Gray Realm the Ocean. With the perspective of someone at home in that realm—'calm in the vastness, dreamin'”—Atkinson sings to us from the deep, meditating on 'the visible to sound the depths of the felt.'---Allison Funk, author of The Visible Woman
In this vigorous collection of tight yet sweeping lyric constructions, Atkinson continually turns our attention toward the work of a number of important women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. And through this generous act of homage to figures such as Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, and Emmi Whitehorse, she also implicitly points to the important poetic œuvre created by women during the same period by creating her own in the form of poems whose intricate webs juggle the concrete with the suggestive, the provocative with the pensive. And above all, rises her sound—Atkinson has an orchestral gift; somehow both delicate and dense, it’s an art that allows language to transcend meaning, and she is its consummate practitioner.---Cole Swenson