Geranium Lake

Named for a bold pink pigment that fades over time, Leslie Schultz's vibrant collection Geranium Lake is an ekphrastic extravaganza as well as a meditation on age, time, and beauty. Schultz's refreshing curiosity is evident as she engages with individual works of art and with larger issues of looking, curation, and display. Schultz's eye for quirky details and her ear for playful sounds reminds me of that other great ekphrastic poet, Marianne Moore. "I know the struggle to make one / thing true," reminding us that making art-and making a life-is a long process with endless twists and turns: "for each new page, dozens crumpled and torn." For Schultz, the process is the point. Geranium Lake teaches us what it means to live a life devoted to apprehending, and making, beauty. This is one collection that won't lose its luster no matter how much time passes.

-Melissa Range, author of Horse and Rider and Scriptorium

Lovers of poetic language will find a lot to love in Geranium Lake. Schultz has an ear for the syncopated twang and buzz of speech, and she has a photographer's eye for salient detail. In "Blois" she depicts "Barges across centuries, / sliding up the Loire / like garbage scows." and then conjures the sounds of harpsichords and "leather boot heels, silken slippers / (deliciously-made as pastries, / slippery as fog)." An old Italian postcard offers a Renaissance bell tower rising from the "green-rimmed bowl / of Florentine hills" like a "Sonic silo, housing / seven named bells." The Sacre Coeur in Paris appears "like an empty skull / against morning clouds' dove-grey tulle." In these terrible times, Schultz recommends the realm of the aesthetic as a respite, suggests taking time to stop and consider the world's jeweled surfaces.

-James Armstrong, author of Blue Lash and Empire

Leslie Schultz's new collection, Geranium Lake is smart, wise, elegant, and lucid. Read these poems aloud for their music, or use them as a field guide to an eclectic range of art worthy of sampling, including sculpture, architecture, old postcards, "outsider" art, even music and landscape. The eight sections lead from one to another like galleries in a fine museum. When I'd finished the book, I felt dazzled, also nourished and changed, in love once again with the textures and brilliance of our visible (and invisible) worlds.

-Scott Lowery, author of Empty-Handed and Mutual Life