Night at the Musée d'Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities by Judy WellsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Regent Press produced both Night at the Musée d’Orsay and The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, but Wells’ volume of travel, culture and art narrative musings is like Zaccardi’s in classic stylishness compared to Bernard’s “Penguin Editions” smaller size and typeset, which is more of a pungent “pocket volume” for the bus, train or Saturday afternoon. I liked them both.
Wells read at the 2727 Gallery for Poetry Flash in June, and we were both fortunate to travel to Europe as young women language and literature students, and then again in the last decade or so. Comparing the views, remembering the tones, reflecting on how our lives, relationships and perspectives have shifted and/or persisted.
Now she can lament
The beautiful child
The Infanta Margarita
that Velasquez painted…
betrothed at 15…
died at age 21---
worn out by endless births
and miscarriages...
I gasped when I read…
comes straight out of the feminist revolution that came in between. Her appreciation of her Mother’s recent passing, traveling with “surrealist” poet husband Dale Jensen and viewing and reviewing the lives, landscapes and works of Kafka, Renoir, Hundertwasser:
He wanted irrational beauty
echo the universality of love, music and suffering as communities celebrated deaths, concerts, readings and rites of passage in Paris, Ravenna and the Czech Republic.
St Francis, like
Allen Ginsberg, stripped naked
to start his new life…
strikes her in “On Viewing Giotto’s Mural”
reeling back to my own adolescence
when I was a believer
when I learned my catechism
so I could answer any question
the Bishop might ask me…
in “Pentecost in Orvieto.”
Very fine!
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