Color and Line

It's been said, to be an artist is to feel everything more deeply than most people; this includes the lovely as well as the ugly. Carole Mertz's ekphrastic collection, Color and Line amply demonstrates this. Ekphrasis not only "describes" the art from which the poem is drawn, but more importantly, the poet invests herself emotionally and artistically in the total edifice of the work. Color and Line builds of this investment a place where readers may safely and sacredly process their own feelings and responses. Mertz employs her considerable talent using a variety of forms and devices to showcase fresh ways of knowing and feeling both self and the world.

-Michael Escoubas is editor and book reviewer for Quill and Parchment online poetry journal

In Color and Line, Carole Mertz captures the essence of art with the authority of a critic and skilled poet leaving us breathless

-Carol Smallwood, MLS, MA, Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, is a literary reader, judge, interviewer; her 13th poetry collection is from Main Street Rag

In Carole Mertz's new collection, there are stellar thought-constructs to be discovered by the reader: "But this is Cornell's world, not ours; a place / where he can safely relate to small, varied things." Yet his world becomes ours too because Mertz guides us, and we do, indeed, relate, experience, emote as we travel with her to those "varied things." Color and Line is a gorgeous collection of predominantly ekphrastic poetry that reveals depths below the line and whole worlds beneath the artist's canvas. The poet writes, she hopes her works afford us "some entertainment," but these precisely cut gems offer far more. Her lines become tightly condensed treatises on metaphor and wordplay, the wellsprings of poetry in which "signifiers bounce behind the stag's eyes." Color and Line is rich in allusions, witty, and riveting. Readers will keep this volume nearby to return to again and again, wondering like Mertz, how "Virginia Woolf's snake got into our heads, "lurking."

-Nancy Dafoe, author of ten published books and winner of the 2016 William Faulkner-Wisdom award in poetry