Porthole View

Dispersed among some ten poems celebrating the nubiferous paintings of Arthur Dove (1880-1946)) are another forty (also nubiferous) poems by Lynne Potts. I believe this transcendent duplicity requires some prompting about Dove's pictures which are among the earliest abstract works painted in this country. Dove and his second wife Helen Torr lived on a river boat in eastern NY, where their aim was to discover the exact color and form or motif to represent the essence of the object painted. Hence Helen's countless questions ("How does one capture the soma of the sea? / Watch until transparency turns liquid topaz." And again: "Outside the boat window / the storm had cleared; he painted it pale yellow, / a serrated knife for lightning. She put it in his / accumulating pile, not far from her few." The immense satisfaction of Porthole View is the impossibility of uncoupling the licentious recreation of Dove & Torr from the learned originality of Lynne Potts. -Richard Howard With a luminous clarity Lynne Potts peers into the world of artist couple Arthur Dove and Helen Torr. Find in these beguiling poems an urgency and buoyancy about what presses upon the artistic spirit and process, and upon the fragile fabric of a relationship. -Nance Van Winckel