Serious Pink: Ekphrastic Poems

Rating:
Summary: Serious Pink: Re(a)d!
Review: I'm not a big poetry fan, and work in visual arts: liked this book so much, I bought 2 copies. It's smart w/o being academic, sensual, at times funny and at times get a lump in my throat reading it. And there are lines still running through my head. Got me back to canvas. These are real poems, you'll get lost in it the way you do while looking at the paintings she's talking about: as she says, serious pink is red, now I won't forget it!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent.
Review: Sharon Dolin, Serious Pink (Marsh Hill Press, 2003)

Sharon Dolin's Serious Pink is a collection of ekphrastic poems (for those not up on their jargon, "ekphrastic" simply means "a poem based on a piece of art in another medium"). All the poems here are taken from abstract pieces, which could lead to either brilliance or stupidity. Thankfully, Ms. Dolin firmly hits the mark on the former. The title, get your dirty mind out of the gutter, is from a quote by artist Howard Hodgkin; "Can you imagine a serious pink next to a trivial blue or even a ridiculous black?" It's a wonderfully ambiguous statement, and as such makes an excellent choice of title for such wonderfully ambiguous poems. "Serious pink seems to lean on everything/in spite of trivial blue candy canes/curtain folds on a proscenium stage." ("Day Dreams")

The collection's centerpiece is "Ode to Color," a long work littered with quotes from artists, magazines, manuals on painting, and the like, interspersed with memories of a speaker who may or may not be the poet, both joyful and traumatic, all centered around the color red. There are greater things in heav'n and Earth, Horatio, than you'd have imagined the color red to be useful in describing.

An excellent performance. ****