Painted Daydreams

B. Elizabeth Beck's Painted Daydreams is a multi-media experience: While evoking canonic images from artistic icons and iconoclasts alike, from Rothko to O'Keeffe to Basquiat, these ekphrastic poems also allow a reader to eavesdrop on intimate conversations between Beck and these artists who inspire her—the whispers in Van Gogh's one good, remaining ear backed by psychedelic riffs from Phish and the Grateful Dead. All the while, Beck's life in Kentucky—the collection's vivid underpainting—peers through, ensuring that though these poems may well have sprung from the staid environs of art museums, they breathe and sweat in the vivid, living world.

Taken together, the formally diverse and kaleidoscopically (allusionistically!) rich Ekphrastic poems in B. Elizabeth Beck's collection Painted Daydreams are a lot more than responses to (or even meditations on) works of visual art. They are a reminder that to live an artful life is to see the art in everything one does, and to feel it in everything one experiences, whether that's out on a run listening to Phish, walking barefoot in a river, or staring searchingly into a Rosa Bonheur painting and finding there one's own complicated relationship to the world. Painted Daydreams is itself a vivid portrait of the mind in motion over a lifetime, looking at and being with/in art. As such, it electrifies not only art, but the desire to be alive.