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Second Sight: Poems for Paintings by Carroll Cloar
Dabney Stuart
A book-length conversation between two art forms: the poet Dabney Stuart writing poems to and for the paintings of Carroll Cloar. Cloar was a Southern magic realist — his Arkansas and Memphis scenes hover between memory, folklore, and dream — and Stuart's poems try to see them in words, matching their strangeness rather than merely describing it. Reproductions sit alongside the poems so the eye and ear work together, each art feeding the other. It is a quietly ambitious example of ekphrasis done as genuine collaboration rather than caption. For readers drawn to the meeting place of poetry and painting, or to Cloar's haunting regional vision, it is a rewarding pairing.
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The poet and the painter
Dabney Stuart (b. 1937) is a Virginia poet, longtime editor of Shenandoah, and a prolific man of letters. His subject here is Carroll Cloar (1913–1993), an Arkansas-born painter based in Memphis whose meticulous, dreamlike scenes of the rural South earned him a devoted following as a kind of Southern magic realist. Stuart writes as a poet meeting a painter on equal terms.
The book
Published in 1996 by the University of Missouri Press. It pairs reproductions of Cloar's paintings with Stuart's poems, so the book is meant to be looked at and read at once — an interdependence of image and word rather than illustration.
How to read it
As ekphrasis in its fuller, collaborative sense: the poems don't explain the pictures but answer them, reaching for the same uncanny register. Its pleasure is in the friction and rhyme between the two.
For more context
Cloar's own paintings and the literature on his work; and the broader tradition of poems-for-paintings, from Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" to the ekphrastic poems of William Carlos Williams.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Dabney Stuart
- Publisher
- University of Missouri
- Place of publication
- Columbia, Missouri
- Year
- 1996
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine