90 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Biography / Artists, Architects, Photographers | Poetry / American-General | Poetry / Death, Grief, Loss
The poems in The Gentle Art, a compelling new collection from William Wenthe, move between the life of the painter James McNeill Whistler and a poetic version of the author, who is at once inspired and disturbed by Whistler. The present-day author sheds light on Whistler’s artistic vocation and the beauty of his paintings, most notably the liminal London riverscapes that he named Nocturnes, yet recoils at the cost of Whistler’s devotion to art: lovers abandoned, friends turned into enemies, his own children given away to adoption.
Creating a kind of dual biography, Wenthe grapples with feelings of admiration and disaffection toward Whistler as he tries to perform his own roles as parent, partner, and poet. While some of the poems are narrative, their overall effect is associative—two lives superimposed in a double exposure, with attention to what the contrast of two centuries, the nineteenth and the twenty-first, reveals about the relationship of art to money, class, and politics.
William Wenthe has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes. His previous poetry collections include God’s Foolishness and Words before Dawn. Born and raised in New Jersey, he has lived in New York City and Virginia, and teaches poetry at Texas Tech University.
“The Gentle Art retraces the career and life of the great artist James McNeill Whistler while simultaneously recounting the author’s own journey through life as a poet, overlaying ‘period’ scenes with episodes from his own narrative so that they illuminate each other in remarkable ways. Over the course of the book, we witness, and experience for ourselves, the evolution of Wenthe’s feelings about his gifted, complicated, and sometimes infuriating subject.”—Jeffrey Harrison
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