Reviews

 

 

Venice: City That Paints Itself
Poems by Fran Castan, Paintings by Lewis Zacks

Canio's Editions, Canio Pavone, 2010; 48 pages; $30.00
ISBN 978-1-886435-18-6, paper
http://www.lewiszacks.com/book.html

Reviewed by Bonnie Walker

Venice: City That Paints Itself, by Fran Castan and Lewis Zacks, pairs each of Castan's poems with a painting by Zacks of a related locale in the much-storied City of Light. Castan and Zacks are wife and husband, and the literary and visual artworks included in this volume were composed during the couple's extended stay in Venice, which coincided with the 400th anniversary of the death of Tintoretto, one of the foremost painters—and perhaps the most "Venetian"—to emerge from the Italian Renaissance. More than mere tourists but less than full-fledged denizens, Castan and Zacks maintain the wonder of outsiders in Venice while enjoying an intimacy with the city worthy of those who belong in and to it.

Venice is renowned as one of the most romantic of cities, and Castan's poetry is animated by romance—both the romance between husband and wife and the romance between the couple and the city itself. The bond between Castan and Zacks, a persistent undercurrent throughout the volume, expresses itself implicitly in the dialogue between Castan's words and Zacks's images. It also explicitly anchors several of the poems.

In the book's opening poem, "On Our Bedroom Wall," Castan uses characteristically vivid and poignant imagery in comparing herself and her husband as they lie together in bed to the figures of the saints who populate Venice's famed frescoes

Sunlight, drenched in a nearby canal,
Paints halos on our shadows.

The lovers' imperfect resemblance to such exalted masterpieces does not, however, sadden or inhibit them. Being absorbed, metaphorically, into Venice's hallowed artistic landscape has the opposite effect, removing all obstacles to their unconditional acceptance of themselves and one another. "We are saints," the poet declares, "the way we love each other/ In plain sight of our faults." The couple "make love as [they] are," finding in their recognition of themselves as "a fragile pair in a fresco by a grand master" not existential anguish but life-affirming freedom.

This trope of the individual as work of art surfaces repeatedly in the poetry. Venice does not merely "paint itself"; it aestheticizes everyone and everything within its sphere of influence. In Castan's Venice, art is not static material for an objectifying gaze but rather a dynamic and transformative force. All life and all activity become art, self-consciously so. Like divas insistently aware of their "best side," the gondolas that circulate in the city's canals pose purposefully for their audience:

Like a beautiful woman who knows
How light paints lips,
How shadow improves a cheek,
And turns her superior profile
To those who admire her,

The gondola enters Bacino Orseolo …

Even the "synovial grief" of an Achilles tendon provides occasion for a meditation on connections between the human form and the art and architecture that humans create; in "Marble Relic: Achilles," the poet regards her "nearly fossil" heel, "smooth as the skin of a statue," as a precursor to "the stone family [she] may someday join":

The heat and stress that forms
Marble will obliterate my bones,
But a few stray minerals may remain—
Crystal brilliance in the shape of veins.

As she imagines the minerals of her bones taking their rightful place alongside the marble, the poet is not simply admiring or contemplating an object of beauty; she is pondering her own eventual union with it. The poet becomes as much artwork as artist.

Yet art, as experienced and expressed in these poems, is not simply about beauty and aesthetics; it also serves as a bridge between the past, present, and future, dissolving the barriers between the Venice of long ago, the Venice of Castan's experience, and the Venice that she envisions will persist long after she is gone. In "The Composition of Paint," a visit to the pigment store, with its cases of colorful pulverized minerals, conjures visions of the "drops of oil/ Old masters extracted/ From walnuts/ And stirred into these bits/ From the deep earth…" In the space of a few stanzas, Castan imagines the painters of Venice's past inhaling toxins from their pigments, hallucinating the angels that feature so prominently in their works, and, finally, dying and decaying into a union with the earth. Castan foresees that the elements of their decomposed bodies will be subsumed into the geological processes of mineral formation and become material for the art of the future, perpetuating a circle of life based on artistic creation:

Each cell into magnificence
That will rise again as a gem
Painted back into light
Traveling now to the future
Hand of a new master.

This is the old idea of achieving immortality through art, but with a twist. The artist does not live on in a body of work that will be appreciated beyond his or her death. Instead, immortality lies in becoming one with art, in living on as art itself, rather than as its departed, absent creator.

The poems in this volume are preoccupied with death. Yet their tone is never grim or pessimistic, and, while the dead linger in the text as an almost palpable ancestral presence, they do not haunt it. Their presence is reassuring rather than oppressive or frightening. In "Transients," Castan takes what, in most contexts, would be a viscerally disturbing experience—an unexpected encounter with a rat on the stairway to her room—as an opportunity to laugh, thinking of how Venetians of long past "must have leapt over nests of rats." As she sidesteps the intruder and scales the steps two at a time, she expresses appreciation to the ancestors who cradled her body into being (the "vibrant body/ They made over thousands of years") for the "instinctive wisdom they bequeathed [her]."

The voice one hears when reading Castan's poems is characterized by a gentle confidence. It is a powerful voice, which, because it is aware of its own power, sees no need to draw attention to itself or to anything other than its subject. The poet is introspective but not self-centered. She finds solace outside, rather than inside, the self, rushing headlong into romance without straying into sentimentality and facing death without falling into self-absorbed despair. Castan invokes numerous artists, musicians, and writers who also found inspiration in Venice and who now, in turn, inspire her, among them Tintoretto, Vivaldi, and Robert Browning. One of Castan's poems is titled "At Browning's Palazzo, Listening to Chopin," and, in the notes at the end of the book, Castan describes herself imagining Browning in his palazzo, "writing the poems that changed [her] life." Castan manages to take inspiration from Browning and the other eminent figures who preceded her without being intimidated into hapless imitation. The voice that emerges is distinctly her own.

But while Castan is able to stand apart from the shadows of her poetic idols, Zacks seems slightly more cowed by the magnificence of Venice's artistic heritage. Zacks follows dutifully in the footsteps of artists such as Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent, painting his own versions of the majestic sites that inspired him and Castan when they came to Venice. His renderings are masterful, and the lovely impressionistic painting of Santa Maria della Salute that graces the cover of the book is a more effective advertisement for Venice than any travel brochure ever could be. He depicts a range of Venetian locales while expertly employing a variety of styles and techniques. However, while Zacks's adoration, even worship, of the city shines through in every piece, no unifying artistic vision emerges.

Nonetheless, it would be impossible to deny the impressive skill and artistic range demonstrated in these works of art. And the strong narrative voice of Castan's poems anchors the paintings, lending them a coherence they might otherwise lack. The paintings, in turn, provide the poems with an additional layer of complexity and offer the reader a focus for contemplation. The harmonious marriage of poetry and painting in this lovingly prepared volume is a testament not only to the potential of different artistic disciplines to complement and inform one another but also to the successful working relationship that Castan and Zacks enjoy as spouses and as collaborators.

 

Bonnie Walker is a writer, editor, and photographer who lives in New York City. She teaches at Mercy College.