The Gauguin Answer Sheet (The Contemporary Poetry Series) (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Aorta, Keeping The Whitecaps White
Climbing Out Through The Mummy
Come, Endure
Conspirators, Speaking
From, From...
Her Kiss Evaporates His Testimony Calcifies
Interlude: For The Shy One
Interlude: Mary K On You And The Omnivore
Interlude: The Shy One On Skin And Light
Out Of Mouths
Scratch, Sniff
Some Of You Look Into This, My Mouth
Start Our Eyes
Ultimata
A Word Dressed In Fog
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Description

The painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin, intended as the painter's final artistic testimony, is the inspiration and framework for this book. In one way, The Gauguin Answer Sheet focuses on the intricate details of the painting and offers its lush Tahitian landscape and characters--a black dog, a pair of conspirators, a shy woman, a pleading goddess, and a crouching mummy, among many others. In another sense, Dennis Finnell deeply probes the underlying implications--and personal associations--the painting offers.

The poem's own questions, suggested by those in the painting's title, are concerned with origins, identities, and futures--of the poet and others. Finnell reflects on the plight of the characters portrayed in Gauguin's painting and imagines their thoughts and feelings about life in the world outside. Along with his ruminations on these imagined characters, Finnell visits his own family history, reflecting on the lives of earlier generations, to affirm the shared nature of each individual's origins and identities. Through his poetry, time and space, painting and history, and imagination and reality interconnect and offer an unusually imaginative, surprising work of art.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press; First Edition edition (May 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820322938
• ISBN-13: 978-0820322933
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,416,717 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indescribable, August 18, 2001

By	David Graham "The author" (Wisconsin USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Finnell's entry in the Great American Long Poem Contest is unlike any other I can think of. The individual sections skitter and swoop over great realms of aesthetic, personal, and historical territory, and the tone ranges from hilarity to wistfulness. In the guise of a meditation on Gauguin's strange allegorical painting, Finnell offers an indescribable mixture of family history, dream vision, artistic rumination, and slanted autobiography--all turning on and returning to the questions posed by Gauguin's title: "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" These huge questions fairly beg for solemnity and bardic posturing, but Finnell addresses them with consummately sly and strange offhandedness. Overall, his imagination is so odd, his sensibility so charming, his diction so fresh and capacious that it's easy to get lost in this book-and even easier to enjoy it.