"The two-fold beauty of One Thousand Years, a book of illuminated poems, flowers from the mutual effort of two artists at their best."–Molly Peacock
|
Corinne Robins: One Thousand Years Illustrations by Joyce Romano
|
Molly Peacock: "Here is a mother-poet/daughter-artist team, infusing their post 9/11 New York sensibilities into medieval legends and images from Heloise to St. Joan. The truism that life is but a pilgrimage takes on new beauty in Robins’ lyrics of chivalry, castles, and abbeys, while Romano’s work re-illuminates the ways art takes us on the road to God. Robins’ poems explore the images of medieval life as Romano displays its architecture. Each page of One Thousand Years deepens Robins’ and Romano’s visions into a robust conversation about one of the great subjects of art, the journey–seen here from two points on the voyage."
"With quiet lyricism and sharp sensuality, the poems in this remarkable book-length project create a virtual medieval reality. 'Art on the road to God/God’s timelessness in cold buildings/crosses topping armies of spires . . .' As such, they provide a multidimensional exploration of the spirit of the age through its painting, architecture, religious and philosophical concepts, and more intimately, its sense of color, space and light. Being a noted art critic as well as a gifted poet, Corinne Robins offers us a unique perspective – one where the pageantry and personae she evokes (Heloise and Galileo’s daughter among them) are not locked in the past, but alive in the flux and imagination of our own present. In combination and collaboration with artworks by her daughter, Joyce Romano, One Thousand Years celebrates a new wedding of word and image.”—Elaine Equi
Corinne Robins, poet and art historian, is the author of the text The Pluralist Era: American Art
1968-81 and two poetry collections. She teaches art history at the School of Visual Arts and art criticism at Pratt Institute.
Joyce Romano, an artist and performer, received her Masters in Art from the Royal Academy
of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden, where she exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art, the SVEA
Gallery and the Modern Museum. In America, she exhibited in the “Bad Girls” Women’s Caucus
Exhibition in Newark, N.J. Her photo images are based on photographs she took in Sweden and
Denmark. She works as a Creative Arts Counselor in Kingston, NY were she also performs with the “Word Salad” Performance Company.
ISBN 0-9724785-6-6 $15.00
|
A THOUSAND YEARS
Art on the road to God,
God's timelessness lives in cold buildings,
crosses topping armies of spires
in processions of church towers
where only the royal dead rest.
Art on the road to God where the twelve apostles
celebrate Christ on his throne,
warning sinners to pray to images in stone
carved out of the heart. Plunging horses
of the night send me down the road
holding a wooden cross upright
against the flatness of Jesus.
"..Life here is but a pilgrimage":
sculptures flank the porches,
moral truths of holy selves.
"I am dying Israel, dying" --
forget the body, save the soul,
pillars, arches, those flying buttresses
helping us leave the earth.
In one thousand years the world ends,
in one thousand and one begins again,
enjoys new beliefs in the efficacy of saints.
Nine-one-one, one thousand and one,
Nine-one-one, two thousand and two --
believe, believe. In a thousand churches
the savior King stands, neck bending,
heart bleeding, "I am dying Israel, dying,"
death the answer, undying death the promise
while you build your fortresses high,
the saints dance, and the devil
waits outside a thousand years.
|
|
