Whispers in the Gallery

Written during a serious illness, the poems in Whispers in the Gallery arose from the author's meditations on timeless masterpieces as he wandered through a virtual art gallery. While the poems are ekphrastic in that they serve to describe and interpret the pieces, they go beyond this, responding to the whispers emanating from these rich and evocative artworks. Titian, Bosch, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Monet, and other masters of brush and canvas emerge alongside masters of other media: Homer, Gesualdo, Beethoven, Melville, and more. From the origins of human imagination and the images evoked by painting and music, to the oddities of anatomy and biology; from the strange fish caught by one trolling the depths, to the great plagues sweeping through history, these poems strike a match in the dark gallery of the unconscious. With each stop in this gallery of the mind, readers eavesdrop on the poet's dialogue with what has been awoken from the unconscious and given voice in the form of a poem. As the collection maps the author's own path of individuation, at the same time, it invites and challenges readers to navigate their own.