Poems of the Winter Palace, by Barbara Krasner

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In Poems of the Winter Palace, poet and historian Barbara Krasner applies her lyrical talent, especially in the form of prose and persona poetry, to address a set of images she curated from the eclectic collection at The Hermitage Museum, housed in The Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia. Twenty-three poems engage in conversation with European history, allegorical, genre, and abstract paintings from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the first section, “Bring Back the Liberal Arts,” Krasner calls for a return of the Liberal Arts while bringing attention to the classical world’s Socrates, Pegasus and Andromeda, realities of Antwerp fish market, and color theory as represented by Dutch masters Rubens and Snyder and modernist Kandinsky, among others.

In the second section, “We Revel,” Krasner examines a spectrum of personalities, including a Bean King on Epiphany, a Dutch doctor, a Dutch trader’s wife, a German vagabond, an Impressionist artist, and a Dutch innkeeper in response to art created by Jordeans, Hals, ter Borch, Friedrich, Pissarro, and Steen.

Finally, in the third section, “This Is How It’s Done,” themes of revolution, war, unrequited love, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and generational and sibling relationships draw on inspiration from Fragonard, Millet, Caravaggio, Matisse, Velásquez, and Vuillard.

Barbara Krasner has been writing in response to art as her way to grapple with chronic disease. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The author of two poetry chapbooks, three novels in verse, and a forthcoming ekphrastic poetry collection, The Night Watch (Kelsay Books), her poetry has also been featured or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw: A Journal of Prose Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Blaze/VOX, Mantis, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey.