N. M. Hoffman and Gloria Matuszewski continue their collaborations "in tandem" in this book of poetry and artwork, THE CHAIRS, from Kearns, Howard & Walker released in February 2024.
THE CHAIRS, like their impressive interpretation of Rainer Maria Rilke's French poems, THE ROSES, was designed by Élie Colistro in France. It was printed by Média Graphic in Rennes, France.
THE CHAIRS poems are a departure in spirit and format for this poet, who generally writes in a longer idiom. These poems are a gesture to Rilke's controlled forms in THE ROSES that simultaneously lean for inspiration into Gloria Matuszewski's commanding paintings devoted to the chair.
These poems are never overtly political or overtly personal. In them, the sensitive reader will recognize both current events and events from the past that linger on the contemporary horizon. These are the strengths of the poet's technical skill overall, that the poems modulate between past and present. This is true also of poems here that are more personal in nature; they modulate between the poet's personal experience and similar experiences shared by other humans, existing on the same planet.
THE CHAIRS also manifests the poet's and the painter's work "in tandem" as presented in numerous exhibitions over 30 years, among these in California at The Commonwealth Club and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and in NYC at The Cornelia Street Café and Jadite Galleries. Their work goes along "at the same time," neither directly reflecting meaning, nor directly referencing image. This is ekphrasis at a high level by serious literary and visual artists who admire and take inspiration from each other in turn after artistic turn, in choice after artistic choice.
THE CHAIRS presents the opportunity for taoist meditation on the course of contemporary events combined with remembrance and overt gestures to memory and its significance. In the artistic forging of events and memory, of current time and the past, the artists have created a kind of pyrotechnic testament to our challenges, our missed opportunities, to generational courage, to peace, and to hope.
