Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

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.