You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
zahiryn 's review for:
Poems to See by: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry
by Julian Peters
*I received an ARC of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*
Confession time: I love classic poetry.
You can often catch me quoting famous lines, gesticulating wildly with my hands. My students roll their eyes, embarrassed on my behalf, but I digress. There is something charming in the familiar, magic in re-reading known works, in studying the sentences that have endured and enamored us, and witnessing how they change: every generation comes back to the classics and “sees” them anew. That’s the thing about poetry, perhaps; the poet writes and decides and means, but the readers read and feel as they see fit. Readers interpret. And these interpretations can become essays and extensive analyses, but they can also become other forms of art. Maybe a song, maybe a drawing. Why not a comic? Julian Peters certainly asked himself that.
“Poems to See By” is an illustrated anthology of classic poems —24, to be exact. Each poem is accompanied by the author’s visual interpretation in the often breathtaking, sometimes amusing form of a comic. As a graphic designer, this sounded like the perfect marriage of two beloved passions. Excited, I requested the collection.
I wasn’t disappointed. This book is exactly what it promises to be, and more. I thought that a single artist tackling 24 poems would result on repetitive styles or obvious recurrences of motifs. Peters did neither. Overall, the breadth of variety in this book is frankly impressing. So is the use of colors and shapes, the different lines and shades. I would’ve never guessed that this was the work of a single artist; despite knowing it was, I still did a double take on more than one occasion, hurrying back to the start to verify that, yes, Peters was the only illustrator. His love for these poems, and the respect with which he approaches each drawing, is crystal clear. His reverence doesn’t stop him from imagining new meanings, and the results are much stronger for this: “As much as it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it’s also the case that a single word can conjure up as many pictures as there are people who read it”.
The book is divided into six sections: Seeing Yourself, Seeing Others, Seeing Art, Seeing Nature, Seeing Time, Seeing Death. The poetry selection for each, in itself, is lovely, with works from a wide variety of familiar names: Dickinson, Angelou, Cummings, Poe, Hughes, among others. Though many of the poems are extremely familiar, others are overlooked jewels of their author’s. I was happy to find some of my favorites among the selection, and I think everyone will find at least one of theirs.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to fans of poetry and visual arts. Moreover, it would be a lovely addition to every high school English classroom, and a great reference for classes that study and analyze the intersection of visual and textual art-forms. I know I will use it in my own classes. I leave you with Peters’ preface:
“The truth is, I did it all for love of beauty. A beautiful poem is pretty much the most beautiful creation I can imagine… I wanted to pay tribute to the way these poems made me feel, to spend time with them, to pull them in as close to me as possible in the way that, as someone who draws comics, felt the most natural”.
Confession time: I love classic poetry.
You can often catch me quoting famous lines, gesticulating wildly with my hands. My students roll their eyes, embarrassed on my behalf, but I digress. There is something charming in the familiar, magic in re-reading known works, in studying the sentences that have endured and enamored us, and witnessing how they change: every generation comes back to the classics and “sees” them anew. That’s the thing about poetry, perhaps; the poet writes and decides and means, but the readers read and feel as they see fit. Readers interpret. And these interpretations can become essays and extensive analyses, but they can also become other forms of art. Maybe a song, maybe a drawing. Why not a comic? Julian Peters certainly asked himself that.
“Poems to See By” is an illustrated anthology of classic poems —24, to be exact. Each poem is accompanied by the author’s visual interpretation in the often breathtaking, sometimes amusing form of a comic. As a graphic designer, this sounded like the perfect marriage of two beloved passions. Excited, I requested the collection.
I wasn’t disappointed. This book is exactly what it promises to be, and more. I thought that a single artist tackling 24 poems would result on repetitive styles or obvious recurrences of motifs. Peters did neither. Overall, the breadth of variety in this book is frankly impressing. So is the use of colors and shapes, the different lines and shades. I would’ve never guessed that this was the work of a single artist; despite knowing it was, I still did a double take on more than one occasion, hurrying back to the start to verify that, yes, Peters was the only illustrator. His love for these poems, and the respect with which he approaches each drawing, is crystal clear. His reverence doesn’t stop him from imagining new meanings, and the results are much stronger for this: “As much as it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it’s also the case that a single word can conjure up as many pictures as there are people who read it”.
The book is divided into six sections: Seeing Yourself, Seeing Others, Seeing Art, Seeing Nature, Seeing Time, Seeing Death. The poetry selection for each, in itself, is lovely, with works from a wide variety of familiar names: Dickinson, Angelou, Cummings, Poe, Hughes, among others. Though many of the poems are extremely familiar, others are overlooked jewels of their author’s. I was happy to find some of my favorites among the selection, and I think everyone will find at least one of theirs.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to fans of poetry and visual arts. Moreover, it would be a lovely addition to every high school English classroom, and a great reference for classes that study and analyze the intersection of visual and textual art-forms. I know I will use it in my own classes. I leave you with Peters’ preface:
“The truth is, I did it all for love of beauty. A beautiful poem is pretty much the most beautiful creation I can imagine… I wanted to pay tribute to the way these poems made me feel, to spend time with them, to pull them in as close to me as possible in the way that, as someone who draws comics, felt the most natural”.