Eyes with Winged Thoughts

Poems and Photographs

Gordon Parks

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780743279628
• eBook ISBN:
  9781416588573
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

In Eyes with Winged Thoughts, the forty-four photographs and fifty-eight poems, reflecting on his long and extraordinary life, offer a rare glimpse of his thoughts and feelings about everything from romantic love to the Iraq war and the passing of Pope John Paul II. He has done it all. Gordon Parks's life was an astonishing litany of firsts: in the 1940s he was the first African American photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and for Vogue and Life magazines; in the 1960s he would become the first African American director of a major motion picture. A dominating figure in contemporary American culture, he was an artist of uncompromising vision and creativity.In 2002 Parks received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, just a few in a series of honors that began when he received a prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941 and which now includes an Emmy, a National Medal of the Arts, and over fifty honorary doctorates. In his nineties, he revealed the luminous photographs on display in Eyes with Winged Thoughts and the poems—some meditative and lyrical, some raw with emotion about the war in Iraq and the tragedy of the tsunami—show that he is still a true American Renaissance man.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• GENESIS
• RIVERING THOUGHTS
• A CHOSEN SPACE
• AN AWAKENING
• MOMMA
• THE PARTING
• DEATH OF A WHEAT FIELD
• THE FUNERAL
• THE MOTHER’S LANE
• THE FINAL HOURS
• BELINDA’S TEAR
• LAST RITES
• A SOULFUL WEAPON
• UNCLE JED
• LOOKING BACK
• A PIECE OF HOPE
• BIRDS
• A WINTER TREE
• A CELESTIAL STORK
• FOREVER AND EVER
• A GIFT
• PROBLEMS IN PARADISE
• AROMAS FROM THE PAST
• DAPHNE
• TICKET TO HOPESTOWN!
• WRATHFUL FRIENDS
• HORATIO AND REBECCA
• THE STRANGER
• IN RETROSPECT
• DREAMS AND STORMS
• NO APOLOGIES
• NIGHTMARES
• SHADOWS
• IT HAPPENED
• THAT’S THE WAY THINGS ARE
• CONFESSION
• A DREAM
• AFTER MOONFALLS
• ECHO FROM THE DARKNESS
• CONFUSION
• SUGGESTIONS
• WHAT’S HAPPENING?
• DEATH IN BATTLE!
• WHERE WERE GOD’S ANGELS?
• NOW AND THEN
• BREAKING NEWS
• WHAT NOW?
• HARAM! HARAM! HARAM!
• CHRISTMAS EVE TO REMEMBER
• SADDAM
• BOTTOMLESS TUESDAY
• SATANIC ADVICE
• TSUNAMI! TSUNAMI!
• LUNCH IN MOSUL
• COME SING WITH ME!
• TO MOURN—YET CELEBRATE
• EPILOGUE: POPPA JACK’S LEGACY
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS