In "In Facing It Again, Robins does not shrink from naming her personal pains and triumphs... This book is a testament to a long and committed life told here with painful honesty and marvelous lyric excursions.

 

Corinne Robins: Facing It Again: New and Selected Poems

Illustrations by Sal Romano

Comments on Today's Menu

What art and the art of poetry especially are today—that’s what Corinne Robins provides us, nothing short of art in its fullest power, the art of fully invented poem after poem.”—Lawrence Joseph

“'Art, Art, Art!' With exuberant repetition Corinne Robins begins Today’s Menu, her best book of poems so far. These poems whisk readers on a fast-clipped journey through the world orf visual art from the nineteen sixties to the twenty-first century, displaying delight and depth of gratitude at the life-saving nature of the image. She buttonholes her favorite painters and sculptors the way Blake questions his Tyger, firing up ekphrasis, and burning each poem bright.”— Molly Peacock

Comments on One Thousand Years
“With quiet lyricism and sharp sensuality, the poems in this remarkable book-length project create a virtual medieval reality. 'Art on the road to God/God’s timelessness in cold buildings/crosses topping armies of spires . . .' As such, they provide a multidimensional exploration of the spirit of the age through its painting, architecture, religious and philosophical concepts, and more intimately, its sense of color, space and light. Being a noted art critic as well as a gifted poet, Corinne Robins offers us a unique perspective – one where the pageantry and personae she evokes (Heloise and Galileo’s daughter among them) are not locked in the past, but alive in the flux and imagination of our own present. In combination and collaboration with artworks by her daughter, Joyce Romano, One Thousand Years celebrates a new wedding of word and image.”
—Elaine Equi

“Here is a mother-poet/daughter-artist team, infusing their post 9/11 New York sensibilities into medieval legends and images from Heloise to St. Joan. The truism that life is but a pilgrimage takes on new beauty in Robins’ lyrics of chivalry, castles, and abbeys, while Romano’s work re-illuminates the ways art takes us on the road to God. Robins’ poems explore the images of medieval life as Romano displays its architecture. Each page of One Thousand Years deepens Robins’ and Romano’s visions into a robust conversation about one of the great subjects of art, the journey–seen here from two points on the voyage.”— Molly Peacock
 
Corine Robins, poet, art historian and widely published art critic is the author of the text The Pluralist Era, American Art 1968–81 and of five previous poetry collections, includng Today’s Menu, published by Marsh Hawk Press. She teaches art criticism at Pratt Institute, is a professor emeritus at the School of Visual Arts, and has curated more than fifteen art exhibitions at the Ceres Gallery in Chelsea, at Pratt Institute and at the Delaware Valley Art Association. She has organized the Poets for Choice reading series at Ceres Gallery since 1995.

Sal Romano is a Professor Emeritus at Herbert H. Lehman College and throughout the 1970s showed large scale installations at the Max Hutchinson Sculpture Now Gallery in Soho. His present work has evolved from kinetic water installations of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Critic Robert Morgan in Sculpture Magazine wrote, “Over the past three decades Romano has been associated with two disparate physical realities; monumentality and water—the flow of ambiance and water, the evolution of floation, fragmentation and reductiveness. The pen and ink drawings included here stemmed from the copper and brass surfaces of his recent sculptures. His exhibition record includes museums and alternative spaces with major shows in New York, Brazil, Italy, Switzerland and Japan.

ISBN978-0-9841177-0-3 $15.00

Poem from Facing It Again

The Lappish Door


There was no “where” above the weather,
sky and sun being what we live under
especially that day standing above the arctic
where we felt like the first people staring
down at scarred rock. Blowing up a mountain makes it smaller—
though these miners did not succeed,
gouging rocky shelves into these steps,
strip mining Kiruna until she shook them off
like an invaded, denuded pyramid,
grand even after they cut her iron heart out.
In the log cabin museum, flint and ores
and 80-year-old photographs of a line
of squat dark men, posed scowling,
discovering iron isn’t much, and finally defeated by the cold
of Kiruna that is nowhere near this midsummer,
paths still lined with bits of ice
as desolation takes us back to our beginnings,
clouds leaning on the mountains, air soft,
we, a family at the end of the world,
watching the last of us walk down the hill,
a girl, yellow band shining in her blue black hair,
looking away toward low hills beyond the cliffs wearing glacial prints.
Distance, distance—the day was in our hands:
mountains, sky between peaks, a looming square
they call the Lappish door, a gray hovering shape
through which they say the reindeer and their people came to earth
—even as we stood watching her move through the close sky
down towards it and down to where?