Lois Read Comments

William F Dougherty 16 July 2013

The Vibrant Palette of a Poet's Mind, July 16,2013 By William F. Dougherty (West Hartford, CT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) This review is from: Breathing Color: Poems by Lois Read (Paperback) Lois Read's verbal brushwork in Breathing Color, a collection of poems that melds visual imagery, allusions to the visual arts, and the singing colors of diverse topographical or place poems, evokes the classical concept of ut picture poesis- a speaking picture. What radiates from her poems is not merely an impasto of description but the pulmonary [spiritual breath of life] processing of coloring vision. Like Arachne's singing tapestries, she hangs variegated scenes and topics from the museum of her mind- landscapes exhaled as the mood-scapes of her iridescent memory in arresting lines like the Easter event in which an angel dabs a paintbrush in liquid sunlight, swipes it against the twig-tops next to skunk cabbage: / a chartreuse shout/ in rose-brown woods. Wading into Lois Read's gallery of tones and techniques is, as she suggests in Purple Shorts, like a swim through raspberry swirls. Or to conclude, knitting diamonds of colors into Argyle Socks in Philosophy 101 that profundities do not suit everyone; that joy accrues from patterned descendants that found form as I struggled/ To be what I am not. Breathing Color is a joy of many hues.

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