How to Paint the Savior Dead

Jason Gray

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781612777856
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Jason Gray's How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women's bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, 'what is heavenly for what is Heaven.'" — Andrew Hudgins"Jason Gray ends his sequence 'Meditations of the Tomb Painters' with the lines: 'Here is my heart in paint, a stowaway / Inside the art that only God would see.' And indeed, in all of Gray's work there is a sense that the heart, the faithful and abiding heart, is best (and most safely) transported via the artifice of poetry. From the heart-wrenching, blank-verse ekphrastic 'My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel...' to the heartily clever nonce 'You Put Your Right Hand In..., ' this is work that is always worshipful of its medium." — Kathy Fagan

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Adam’s Tongue
• Photographing Eden
• A Generic Pietà
• My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel in the Tableau Vivant of Van Grap’s Annunciation
• Stone Goddess
• Hey, You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
• St. Cecilia and an Angel
• Meditations of the Tomb Painters
• The Little Sphinx
• Chiaroscuro
• You Put Your Right Hand In, You Take Your Left Hand Out
• Adam Gifts Eve with a Session of Boudoir Photography
• Chagall in Heaven
• Memento Amori
• Your Art History
• Notes