Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cezanne

Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne re-enacts a journey to Aix-en-Provence in 2013, where the poet found herself in a "heart-soul-mind-clench" with the post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Her book traces how the artist from Aix-en-Provence accompanied her home to the Fraser Valley outside Fort Langley, British Columbia where she gazed through his eyes to see afresh the trees and landscapes near her home. McCaslin's poems stand within the tradition of ekphrastic poetry as both a response to and reenactment of painting. Her book suggests how, by moving toward abstraction while being viscerally connected to the living trees and mountains of his bioregion, Cézanne helps us experience the world in all its shimmering processes. Readers may be surprised to discover the impact of Cézanne's achievement on later poets, philosophers, and writers, the enormity and enduring quality of his legacy. Read as a whole, this book suggests that Paul Cezanne was an early deep ecologist.