![]() ![]() In the paintings, Women Around the Kitchen Table, Women and Doves, Women with Starry Eyes, Woman with Pink Dress and Flowers, and Woman in Blue Hat and Butterflies, there is a celebration of womanhood, their collectivity and connectivity. I’m not pretty, but I look / electric, like I can’t wait to move, to get on with it, my energy / palpable even in a photograph.” That’s the sense that I had when I began turning the pages of The Girls: that I was in the presence of a poet and now an artist overflowing with energy and who is naturally compelled to create, to keep getting on with it no matter where the heart takes her. There she is, she writes “my eyes wide open and sparkling. ![]() In one of her poems she writes about an old family photograph of herself and her two siblings. At first she said she felt tentative working in a new art form, until someone said to her, “Just paint what you feel, the way you write your poems.” Two years ago when she was in California on a reading tour, she explained to me and Carole, my wife, over dinner one evening that she had begun painting again, after a hiatus of many years. The glue that holds the paintings and the poems together is Gillan’s ever-evolving imagination. Her poems are on familiar themes that run throughout her poetry: growing up Italian in New Jersey at mid-century, family, women’s roles, marriage, mortality, and love. The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets is a collection of her poems accompanied by her expressive water color and mixed media paintings. Īfter eighteen books of poems, two national book awards, and an outstanding Community Service in Literature award, Maria Gillan has reinvented herself as a painter. Was recently reviewed by Kenneth Scambrayin in L'Italo-Americano. Maria Mazziotti Gillan's latest book, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets , ![]()
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