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Clouds, Leaves, Waves: A Painter's Poem

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"Clouds, Leaves, Waves." is a highly personal, deeply revealing poetic record of 10 years of Botts' life and work.

From Library Journal Botts is a celebrated and critically respected painter, "devoted," writes Harold Bloom in his introduction, "to the American Sublime," and these writings, gathered from his journals and notes, attest that he is a remarkable poet as well. From lines to words to letters to lines again, a sure hand and perceptive mind, careful eyes and earsis not a poet's task much like a painter's? The visual and tactile imagery of these pieces is to be expected, but it is the life Botts brings to his blend of the representative and abstract that reminds us of his painter's origins. "The tic-toc, the fiction of time" is much of the concern of these lyrical, pensive pieces. A painter's every stroke is a thoughtful and precise decision; in these poems those hesitations become actions, rhythms in and of themselves, considerations and explanations, revelries. These poems are a documentationand moreof the painter's mind, of his works on canvas, and of his physical world. "The paintings on the wall/ dumb, trying to speak/ the look of things, what we felt,/ clouds, leaves, waves, passing." Recommended.Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia