Description: "The poems in A Gray Realm the Ocean were all written under the influence of art-specifically, abstract visual art by women. Although all these poems were, of course and as usual, affected by other poems and poets, each was also written in response to a particular artist's work"--
Brief description: Jennifer Atkinson published five books of poetry before A Gray Realm the Ocean, most recently The Thinking Eye and Canticle of the Night Path, both from Free Verse Editions/ Parlor Press. She is recently retired from George Mason University, where she taught in the MFA and BFA programs in Poetry Writing. She lives in northern Virginia.
Review Quotes: When anyone else describing the wind across snow would have told of its noise or its bitter cold, Jennifer Atkinson attends to its fragrance. Again and again in A Gray Realm the Ocean, Atkinson detects the more muted presence informing a scene through which busier presences bluster. Because her attention to experience is lush with her love of experience, Jennifer Atkinson's exquisite poems consistently "override / the visible to sound the depths of the felt."---H. L. Hix