LENS

Praise for LENS

These landscape-swept poems cross California in time and place. They trace histories of discovery, wildness, change, habitation, struggle, destruction. Knowledge, sorrow, wonder. They hold up a lens, creating a conversation between visual artists, the poet, and place in arresting and flexible language. Each poem is a close look—clear, honest, graceful—and reading them, you will be reminded of what makes place so deeply meaningful to us all. The book is a paean to the nature and majesty of California, to the peoples and animals that have lived within her changing, rich landscape, and to the importance of knowledge, contemplation and art.

Tobey Hiller, Aqueduct

Grace Grafton's luminous new collection of poems is a tribute to California artists from the mid-19th century through the present day. Lens could and should serve as a textbook definition of ekphrasis. Not one iota of beauty escapes the poet's eye. In spare language that radiates joy, she makes the landscapes and stories of these visual works so vivid that we feel convinced we've seen them with our own eyes.

Barbara Quick, Vivaldi's Virgins

Jordan Kantor has written that the denotative function of language is kin, in representational painting, to the way that what is pictured in the painting is foregrounded. As I read Grace Marie Grafton’s luminous and illuminating poems, I see this concept come to life; I see how Grafton begins with her deft translations of what is represented in the art, i.e., the denotative, the powerful gravity of what appears before a viewer’s eye in the artwork. This, she must work both with and against, using her enormously muscular and yet exceedingly well-calibrated craft. In this way her work can soar high above this gravity, but never so far as to leave it out of our sight or mind or leave behind its hold upon the meaning of each poem. This is deft trapeze artistry, practiced without a net. As a reader, I never forget that each reach of image that she takes, each risk, might, in less-skilled hands, plummet earthward and land as a shamble of failure upon our eyes and ears. Yet Grafton’s images remain aloft in meticulously-timed arcs of direct language, which are without embellishment. All is muscle, compelling our eyes to follow her in fear and in delight, as we are given exacting language we then can translate into viscerally visual images in our minds. She risks in this way, her approach resists offering easy explanation or interpretation. She offers us the gift of gathering from the work our own insight, our own complex interpretations of what we see through her powerfully concentrated poems, her LENS.

Rusty Morrison, Beyond the Chainlink

About GRACE MARIE GRAFTON

Grace Marie Grafton's new book, LENS, published by Unsolicited Press, is available August 1st, 2019. It features poems inspired by artists of California and is rich in California history and ecology. She is the author of six previous collections of poetry: Zero won the 2000 Poetic Matrix Chapbook contest. Visiting Sisters is a collection inspired by the artwork of contemporary women. Other Clues consists of experimental prose poems. A chapbook, Chrysanthemum Oratorio, plays with language and concept. Whimsy, Reticence & Laud, also from Poetic Matrix, explores the sonnet form. Jester was published by Hip Pocket Press.

Ms. Grafton taught for many years in the California Poets In The Schools program, for which she was awarded twelve California Arts Council grants. She was named Teacher of the Year by the River Of Words annual student poetry contest co-sponsored by Robert Hass, United States Poet Laureate.

Born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley of a Finnish American family, she now lives in Oakland with her husband and their extended family.