Plenty: Art Into Poetry

Peter Steele SJ has a Personal Chair in English at the University of Melbourne and has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Alberta, Georgetown, Washington and Loyola, Chicago. He is an esteemed Australian poet whose current interest is Ekphrastic poetry, whereby poets bring forth literary works by contemplating masterpieces of painting or sculpture. Poets, from Homer to Auden, have followed this tradition. The fifty-two poems in this book have been inspired by art works over which the poet has mused in his world travels. The renowned Irish poet, Seamus Heany, has written of Steele's book: It is a work of great drive, shine and abundance, at once liberated and intense, a combination of intellectual rigour and imaginative spree. It deepens and widens the course of Peter Steele's own poetry, and since it presents the pictures that inspired the poems, it will invite readers to a new and complex experience'.