Conversations with the Visible:: The Caravaggio Poems

By George Looney

George Looney's Conversations with the Visible: The Caravaggio Poems --this year's New Hampshire May Sarton Poetry Prize winner--is a remarkable act of looking. Throughout the collection, Looney reimagines Caravaggio's paintings through a naked, questioning eye, allowing the saints, angels, martyrs, and familiar religious symbols to become newly strange and deeply human. His poems ask what the eye sees and what the heart feels, uncovering emotional possibilities the paintings seem to conceal in plain sight. His precise, vivid language brings us into the physical world of the paintings--the glint of scattered coins, the heat of a torch, a feathered hat, a single pillow--then turns our attention toward what cannot be seen: desire, mercy, sorrow, love, mortality. The poems' striking economy and ten-line frames echo the paintings themselves, making the collection feel like a gallery of poems. Each poem gave me pause. Together, they offer a haunting meditation on revelation: what remains when there is nowhere left to point, and nothing to distract us from "just what is." --Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest and Those Absences Now Closest For Looney, it is our imperfect, breakable humanity that holds us.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087233418X
• ISBN13: 9780872334182
• Release Date: April 2027
• Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.