[A] marvelous, complex, attractive, frightening book. . . . Ekphrasis (art about art) in Seuss’ wonderfully flexible syntax, with her linguistic pizazz and startling juxtapositions, removes boundaries between living and dying, paradise and hell, made things and live things.”—The New York Times Book Review
“The picturesque and the grotesque pair flawlessly in Seuss’s poems, and even gore has an abject charm. . . . She admires art without forgetting that it’s only a facsimile; she questions whether reality, with all of its texture and dimensionality, can be known at all.”—The New Yorker
“This collection showcases a poet who is writing some of the most animated and complex poetry today. . . . By the end of the book, everything is larger and more vibrant—the paintings, the speaker’s life, the reader and the world. This is the brilliance of Seuss—everything is animated and complicated by her mind, a mind that has a hunch that silence holds truth”—Los Angeles Times
“A skilled, inventive collection.”—The Millions
“Every poem changes perspective in surprising ways with psychographic messages, because Seuss sees a world that combines versatility, tenderness, and sheer lingual strength. . . . Craft, brightness, darkness; she’s writing at the top of her game.”—Washington Independent Review of Books
“With command of language, humor, and emotional intensity, Seuss’s work finds its home in art, philosophy, satire, and semantics. . . . The terrible beauty of this collection is that it shows how necessary art is in helping us get through this life.”—The Rumpus
“In Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Diane Seuss shows us that in stillness, there is so much to see.”—Southern Indiana Review
“Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl exquisitely layers self, art, and language. . . . Seuss demonstrates remarkable tenderness toward her figures and speakers, exquisite control over form and design, and has given us, her readers, another exquisite collection, where visual art and poem are combined into an inextricable whole.”—The Adriot Journal
“Lyrical, lusty, art-centric. . . . Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is as much about running as it is about standing still, and as much about confronting death as it is about rediscovering life. . . . A kinetic art walk rich in observation, curiosity, reverence and impudence.”—Shelf Awareness
“In Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl poetry is an agent of resurrection and reanimation.”—Fork and Page
“Spell-binding in its engagement with music and visual texture, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is a masterpiece of poetic forms that innovate their origins.”—Tyler Mills, On the Seawall
“Seuss hones in on the act of engaging with art to brilliantly imagine worlds beyond a painting’s frame. . . . Invigorating ekphrastic poems and self-portraits.”—Publishers Weekly
“In Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Diane Seuss dives into ecstatically transformative ekphrasis. Still lifes grow animate under her eye, revealing ‘perfect cherries lit as if each held a small red room, and a girl, and a candle bringing gold up through the red walls.’ In the poem ‘Mark Rothko,’ humans morph into paintings: ‘We wore solid yellow shirts and red pants, with a rope belt demarcating the blocks of color, befuddling the critics.’ This book is a merry-go-round in which Seuss is the swan bench, the orange-and-pink horse frozen mid-whinny, the tinny music, and the dizzy rider who disembarks and falls on the grass.”—Matthea Harvey
“Neuroimaging of a reader’s brain under the sway of a Diane Seuss poem must be a fantastic display of light and color. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is abundant with music and vitality. Seuss thrills at art and art history, but she has a leg up on Auden’s Old Masters, who were limited to the material space of the canvas. Seuss’s roving awareness makes no distinction between high and low, beauty and filth, my body and yours. She has coined a new gothic in which nothing is overlooked or expendable. Her vision is urgent, consuming. This book is a ravishment of the eyes.”—Gregory Pardlo
04/15/2018
Titled after Rembrandt's famous painting, this collection from Pulitzer Prize finalist Seuss (Four-Legged Girl) reflects on art but does not offer your typical ekphrastic poems; they're ekphrastic poems on speed. (Ekphrasis, a technique as old as Homer and coming from the Greek meaning "to point out," references verse that details vivid scenes, particularly in art.) Seuss "point outs" and describes paintings by numerous artists, including Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Chardin, Breughel, O'Keefe, Rothko, and Pollock, in a style that changes from free verse to prose poems to sonnet variations. Reading these pieces is suggestive of being in an art museum and listening to Seuss observe various paintings, each of which she interprets in a freely associative manner. As her thoughts alight on the paintings, she discusses them with often stunning visual metaphors, as when she speaks of "the fluttering skirts of opium poppies." Seuss also fuses details from several paintings and effectively blends those details with episodes from her past, as when a still life with a turkey brings to mind incidents from her childhood and early adulthood. VERDICT Reading this collection is a dizzying, challenging, and an overall pleasant experience. Recommended for art lovers and academic libraries.—C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD