Dream Prints

From domestic commonplaces Loretta Bonnier Anawalt has invented a surreal evocation in prose and verse poems, presented as a pattern of dreams "printed" on the mind as one might observe images emerging in a photographer's darkroom. The cohesive intelligence is that of the mature woman, observant, reflective, speculative, larger-than-life, in a world that affords ample matter for her voracious imagination.

Anawalt's sequence of poems is accompanied by a series of paintings by the eminent artist Robert Helm. With his own original surrealism, Helm's works counterpoint the poetry by their distanced repose, and the Jungian resonances which require quite a different kind of response to those we bring to the Freudian passions of the printed page. Yet they have much in common with Anawalt's poetry, in the ways they play upon our expectations with juxtaposed and disjunctive images, and refuse to yield to trite or superficial perusal. Here, art and literature intertwine to provide great evocative power, mystery, and timeless intellectual pleasures.