Under Brushstrokes

Hedy Habra's Under Brushstrokes is a rich tapestry of images, sounds and meanings. Like any tapestry the complexity of weaving, the craft and artistry are often under or subliminal to the larger images, and in this way the book lives up to its title in that there is so much foundation that goes into the building of an image and giving the image not only meanings but breath and life itself. Enjoy Under Brushstrokes, it is meant to be read and read again.

-J.P. Dancing Bear, Editor, The American Poetry Journal

Additional Reviews

The poems in Hedy Habra's Under Brushstrokes amount to something more sweeping than simple ekphrasis. She makes no attempt to describe works of art, but instead uses them as points of departure for explorations of the dreaming psyche. The resulting meditations, often adopting the genre of prose poetry, retain the colorful imagery we expect in visual art, expressed in a language as precise as it is vivid. One senses throughout a constructive awareness of literary and artistic culture in several traditions.

--Alfred Corn, author of Tables

In the poem "Brushstrokes," Hedy Habra writes "the painter raises inexorably the level of the waters, and the woman knows... she will only be fulfilled by drowning in the torrent." The poems, in verse and prose, in Habra's new collection, Under Brushstrokes, pay homage to the transformative power of art in the most authentic way possible--by demonstrating it.

--Stuart Dybek author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern

Under Brushstrokes is an astonishing collection of poems responding to art. Through Habra's accomplished pen, these ekphrastic poems create an immediate world of rich textures and image, giving the reader intimate access to such diverse talents as Klimt, Guccione, Bosch, Tanning, and Hokusai. She explores... the layered connections between the individual and art itself. These are poems of depth and skill, of beauty and paradox, of "words suffused / in linseed oil," as Habra writes--a marvel of a work.

--Sam Rasnake, editor of Blue Fifth Review