Colorful Was Their Voice: Twenty-Five American Poets

As a collaboration between a poet and an artist, Colorful Was Their Voice pays tribute to American poetry in word and color portraiture. The book is the outcome of a dialogue in which ideas and thoughts continuously shift between the visual and the verbal. The dialogue continues within the book: the eye moves back and forth between a brush stroke and a line, an idiom and a contour of the body, between a figure of speech and the figure in color. The poems and paintings relate to each other in diverse ways, rival each other, and complete one another. They compete yet harmonize, hinting in myriad ways about the life and work of each poet, and bringing to life a visual and textual portrait of 25 American masters, such as Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. Colorful Was Their Voice is not only a work of collaboration, it is about collaboration: it reminds readers that in the tradition of the Sister Arts, where poetry and painting converse, they encapsulate the supreme art of the dialogos.