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Carolyn Dahl Artist and Author

Art Preserves What Can't Be Saved

Poems

by Carolyn Dahl
Art Preserves Book Cover

Description

"The [museum] guard is growing uneasy.
He doesn't know this is my memory pinned to the wall."

Dahl begins this compelling collection with her award-winning title poem about a childhood pet she imagines still exists in a Gainsborough painting. With exquisite images, a strong poetic voice, and dramatic narratives, she then guides the reader through her worlds of art, theater, travel, and memory, exploring "not only the soul of art but also the art of the human soul."

Along the way, unforgettable, surprising personas emerge: Max Ernst and a young artist, a hunter with an orphaned fawn, trafficked victims, a tourist riding a night bus in Mexico, "an embezzler of words," and a complainer in the amusing Christmas in a Snowless City. Joining the innocence of a rural world with the complexity of an urban city, "her poems engage the reader with their beauty and their perceptions, their light and dark, and the skill of the poet."

Jurors' Comments

"This chapbook is a fantastic creative experience. It invites the reader to partake in the magic of the imagery in poems that paint vividly. It is an important and commanding piece of literature. Excellent!"

—Juror, Press Women of Texas


"The artist's eye and the poet's ear combine in these beautiful poems. There is whimsy and there is meditation, as this collection displays a breadth that includes dramatic monologues, poems inspired by the Japanese, and evocative vignettes."

—Juror, Nat'l Federation of Press Women


"Skilled prose unfolds throughout this animal spirit collection, but in the end it is sheer humanity wrought through a prism of art."
—Juror, Eric Hoffer Book Awards


Softcover, 45 pages,
$15.00
ISBN: 978-0-9995826-7-1
The Orchard Street Press

What People are Saying about "Art Preserves What Can't Be Saved"

Not surprisingly, the reader will find splendid ekphrastic poems beginning this collection, including the award-winning title poem, Art Preserves What Can't Be Saved. She then delights the reader further by taking on many voices of diverse characters with great skill: an actor's understudy, an embezzler of words, a victim of human trafficking, a deer hunter, and the Immortal Poet, whose quote works well to describe this collection of artistic works, "Poets' eyes flare with fire, and they fly from one world to the next on the backs of dragons, trailing poems behind them like dusky smoke." When I finished my first reading of the book, I exclaimed aloud to my empty office, Wow! And began reading it again.

—Dave Parsons, "Reaching For Longer Water" & 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate


Carolyn Dahl brings us into a luminous world where art, theatre, travel, time and memory intersect. This is a poet's odyssey exquisitely contained in one volume. From a pastoral landscape painted by Gainsborough to the backless-dressed young woman who flirts with an aging art luminary, Dahl deftly brings us into a timeless theatre of light and shadow. Hers is a lyrical interface between the rural and the urban that exposes sinister forces that travel in shadows of normalcy, even as it unveils the child-like wonder and innocence that thrive in the heart of metropolitan life. Hers is a surreal yet redemptive landscape, where flowers are reimagined as "an inedible form of cherries," where "suicide snowflakes refuse to fall."

—Gabrielle Langley,"Azaleas on Fire" & Co-Editor of "Red Sky"


An animal companionship moves through this sequence of poems. The animals form an elegiac thread pulled through observant lyrical meditations on our connection to the wildness of our deepest selves. Dahl creates a sanctuary for creatures such as a race horse whose lungs bleed after its trained desire to run hard, a jaguar caged by a hotel in Mexico, and a hunter's orphaned fawn. She is a rapturous ventriloquist of personas, states of being, and imagined realities full of longing. Dahl's poetic hinges on the ecstatic ease it takes to see with compassion. These poems are an invocation to let "paper eyes explode with sight."

—Loueva Smith, "Consequences of a Moonless Night" and 2018 Judge for Texas Review Chapbook Contest




To purchase "Art Preserves What Can't Be Saved", contact Carolyn at Dahlstudio@aol.com.

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Dahlstudio@aol.com.