Poetry. Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles' shield or Keats's Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. Among his many books are THIS CONSTELLATION IS A NAME: COLLECTED POEMS 1965-2010, SPEAKING THE ESTRANGED: ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF GEORGE OPPEN, BECKMANN VARIATIONS AND OTHER POEMS, TWO NOVELLAS: MARBLE SNOWS & THE STUDY, ESCHATON, EARTH AND CAVE, EXIGENT FUTURES, and WORDFLOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. He wrote the libretto for the opera Benjamin, based on the life of Walter Benjamin. His awards include the NEH Poet/Scholar grant, the Di Castagnola Prize and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. He was born in 1937 in New York City where he now lives.