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Things Seen and Seen Again by Frances Neidhardt. (Austin, Texas: Sulphur River Literary Review Press, 1997, pp. 56. $10 Paper )
Let me see now. You are reading what I have written about what Frances Neidhardt has written about what artists have painted about life. That's true, but it isn't quite that simple. These poems are not just art criticism, though they are that and excellent examples of it.

One of my favorites is her short poem about Mark Rothko, which concludes "All he can do is feed them / fresh loves of paint / that he mounts squarely / at the center of the soul,/ shapes made to substitute for moans." Her first group of poems is entitled "A Portable Museum" and includes most of her poems about art and poetry. It is introduced by an epigraph by Wassily Kandinsky, which relates the visual arts to poetry with a journey metaphor, "At different points along the road are the different arts, each saying what it is best able to say, by methods peculiarly its own." Closely related to this idea of Kandinsky is one of the first poems in the collection where the author/painter is described as taking leave of her senses and vaulting and soaring, leaving the cloister for the outside, "paint sticky feet leaping immaculate floors," in order to blend artist colors, cerulean and cobalt, with "the dew-spread green" of nature and in order to let her feet "pound down hard / on yellow ocher and burnt sienna earth, / making unclean exuberant imprints / for the delight of white titanium stars."

Most of the poems about art relate them to some present moment of the poet's life. One compares a sunset at Marblehead painted by Frederick Church with one "Mediterrean in hue" painted by Picasso and in turn with one, "the pink occurence," she observes: "Nothing exclusive / it has to do with / that balanced moment on the palm of the shell, / when breeze and foam and softening air / make murmurs that extend down the long day of love / even to Mulberry Street." Her portable museum takes us to Paris where she again relates art to the moment: "... I became creator, painter, magician. / I made the blue of Della Robbia / enhance the chalky flesh of sockless / stubbled old gray men. / I set the tilted beauty of a Cezanne bowl / upon their table / commanded cubist violins to play a rondo / within the space around the clattering of bone cold plates, the surp / and belch of greasy food." She makes other stops at Chichen-Itza and the Navajo canyon lands, in Brittany and Provence, in Padua and Florence. She worries about the dangers of the portable museum, writing, "While here I stand in Texas / Blind to the bois d'arc tree, / My head inside a rainbow, my heart / Stopped with the fear that artful / Implantations in my brain / Will hang me on their cross." In the title poem of the collection, she mentions seeing works by Mattisse, Hopper, Louis, Rothko, Chagall, Donatello, and Mossaccio, then says, "And after that / I saw a world / made real through artifice.
But all of her poems are not about works of art or doing art, some are much more personal, about childhood, about love, about an eccentric palm tree nearing death, about a young man's suicide, a Russian cellist, a plane flight at sunset, about many of the interesting things of life.

I have read this short collection now several times, and each time I found something new to enjoy in it. I think it is an extraordinary collection of really fine poems, as good as any being written anywhere. Texas has another poet to be proud of.
The author is both an artist and a poet.

Rothko, Mark

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko

http://www.textanalyse.dk/Billeder/Abstrakt%20ekspr%205%20Mark%20Rothko.jpg

Kandinski

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/kandinsky.comp-7.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/&h=757&w=1135&sz=200&tbnid=0k8GA8ibKC83-M:&tbnh=100&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkandinsky&start=1&sa=X&oi=images&ct=image&cd=1