Meditations on Thomas Cole's Paintings

This collection carefully unearths the hopes and fears of all who try to make sense of their life here on earth, in the setting known as contemporary America. Martin Willitts Jr's five poem microchap 'The Course of Empire' follows a series of paintings by an American landscape painter, Thomas Cole, that was entitled 'The Course of Empires' (plural). Cole, the artist, in 5 commissioned canvas panels depicted the then-apparent devolution of the concept known as Manifest Destiny. He portrayed an America growing from an initial pristine wilderness into a decline of excess and spiritual disappointment. Poet Martin Willits Jr has found a like soul in this 19th-century artist for his literary portraiture of our times. There is some comfort taken in lines from the last poem in this series, Desolation:

The world returns to primal state, reclaiming what was taken away.

To reclaim, we must resurrect the primal underpinnings of nature - our own unedited forestation of thoughts and feeling. 'Eden must have looked like this.' Our memory-selves can be revived by patiently pacing through this daring series.

- Jan Keough, Editor, Origami Poems Project, Florida 2021

"Martin Willitts has always had a talent for speaking his vision, for conjuring imagery. And so it is only natural that when he turns his attention to describing the visions presented by a great painter, his words draw one into a more intimate and involved relationship- both with the artwork and with his perceptions. There is something of trance-induction in this work, and a great deal of depth, and a healing process as well. He has built a wide and lovely bridge between two disciplines in this work."

- Jennifer Hathaway, painter

"Martin Willitts Jr's Meditations on Thomas Cole's Paintings is masterful and stunning! These ekphrastic poems bless us with "song[s] we did not have", and they remind us that, despite our failings, "inside us/[is] a kind of resurrection", which calls again to the divine. Urgent in its quietude, Meditations on Thomas Cole's Paintings by Martin Willitts Jr is lovely, spirit-filled, and prescient."

- Abayomi Animashaun, author of Seahorses