Be Artful
Rita J. Maggart's Be Artful is less a book than a contemplative experience-a conversation between image, word, and silence. In this luminous collection, Maggart fuses her visual practice with poetry, offering meditations that bridge the sensory and the spiritual. Her concise verses act like brushstrokes: each phrase deliberate, pared down, and resonant, leaving the reader suspended in that liminal space between thought and feeling.
The book situates itself within the ekphrastic tradition yet redefines it through intimacy. Maggart does not describe art so much as embody it. The poems often feel like prayers whispered into light-expressions of surrender, resilience, and renewal. She writes not from a distance but from within the act of creation, where making art becomes an act of devotion: "You are the artist Lord / I am the flower." This merging of artistic and spiritual identity becomes the book's heartbeat.
Visually, Be Artful reflects the rhythm of its words: minimal, spacious, contemplative. Each page breathes, allowing the reader to pause between poems as one might linger before a painting. The brevity of the verses invites rereading; their simplicity conceals a subtle depth. Maggart's voice, at once humble and visionary, insists that art is not a separate discipline but a way of living attentively-of seeing the sacred woven through the everyday.
Ultimately, Be Artful reads as a modern illuminated manuscript for the inner life. It reminds us that to create is to listen, to heal, and to return again to wonder. In Maggart's world, to "be artful" is not merely to make art-it is to move through the world with reverence, grace, and a quiet willingness to begin anew.
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