Three Modern Painters veers from the prophetic to the profane in a roller coaster that covers the physical landscape of postmodern America, the emotional terrain of besieged masculinity, and the spiritual plains of Judaism in its 58th century. The three themes are represented by the painters Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Marc Chagall, and are evoked in moving and often surprising tableaus by the author, Gadi Ben-Yehuda.
If Hemingway and Picasso went out for drinks, and at the bar they sat across from a bickering Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and then Mel Brooks wrote a scene about it, you'd have the makings of a poem from Three Modern Painters . The poems zip from the American Bad Lands to the Egyptian desert. They see the world through the eyes of a chronically miscarrying woman who casts herself as the Biblical Hagar and from the perspective of a tailor who wants to be a19th century botanist and whose motto might be "I cannot leave well enough alone."
Whether writing Italian sonnets, Haiku, villanelles or free verse, Ben-Yehuda builds powerful poems that are by turns funny and brooding, personal and prophetic.
Like Marc Chagall, Ben-Yehuda draws on the themes and icons of Jewish texts in "The Twin Rottweilers of Guilt and Forgiveness," "Psalm of Sixteen Possibilities," and other poems in the first chapter of the book. Enid Shomer, poetry series editor for the University of Arkansas Press, writes of the book "this collection is a moral Fantasia with a profound sense of humor and justice."
American painters of the 20th century like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns used the icons of America to illuminate the American condition. In Three Modern Painters, "Beneath the Visible Wreckage," "Why the Gauley River Always Rises," and "How to Build a Mausoleum" trace American landscape itself-the post-apocalyptic desert, the hollows of Appalachia, the bayou-to outline the American psyche.
Finally, the poet turns his attention to a group of people who need poetry the most: men. "Fin de Siecle Geology," "When It Comes," and "Learning to Be a Careful Botanist" are veritable instruction manuals for men looking to navigate the postmodern world without losing or succumbing to the intoxicating dangers of masculinity.
Three Modern Painters is more than a collection of poetry, it's a monorail through the kingdoms of delight and melancholy, with plenty of stops for souvenirs.
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