Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry by Julian Peters 2020

Okay, all of you who get hives at the mention of poetry.  I’ve found the perfect antidote to your aversive reactions—a graphic treatment of the poem!

Peters, a Canadian artist living in Montreal, has chosen 24 wonderful poems by the great poets of the 19th and 20th Centuries— Auden, Eliot, Dickinson, Poe, Heaney, Hopkins and others— and has provided the conventional text following his comic book style interpretation of the poem, line by line.

It works.  Even for this long-time and hard core reader of poetry, I found the graphic treatment of the poems followed by reading them in their conventional style enhanced the experience in a significant way.  The graphics and poems are divided into groups of four labeled Seeing Yourself, Seeing Others, Seeing Art, Seeing Nature, Seeing Time, and  Seeing Death.  Perhaps because of my steadily advancing age, I found the section on time to be the most powerful. These four poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley (“Ozymandias” memorized by high schoolers in my day), John Philip Johnson, Robert Frost (“Birches”), and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ wonderful poem, “Spring and Fall” really spoke to me.  Here’s Manley’s work in its entirety:

Spring and Fall

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
This is a lovely book, beautifully illustrated by Peters with 24 memorable poems.  Whether you’re a confirmed poetry reader or one who shies away from this genre read and look at Peters’ work. I think you’ll love it.