Visions: Paintings Seen Through the Optic of Poetry

Poetry. VISIONS, a new collection of Marc Elihu Hofstadter’s poetry, documents the attempt to reify the optics of paintings into the text of poetry. Marc Hofstadter wields an optical instrument that captures the rays that emanate from the interiors of things, rather than from their outsides. This is what makes him a poet, an excellent one. I believe, as he does that the moment is the key to the eternal and color the key to the invisible–Yves Bonnefoy. To read Marc Hofstadter’s VISIONS is to feel you’re walking through an intimate museum.Zen-like, Hofstadter sets his spare evocations against ‘reality, white, /which is unknown to us, ’ so that we’re left to contemplate again the mysteries of art and artist, color and consciousness, and to remember that ‘sometimes life’s joys are small’–Kim Addonizi