All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to WGBH, Boston’s public television station, to support “Open Studio” and related arts programming.
Though each poem was written in its own time, the organization and flow of For Art’s Sake is an intentional effort to integrate them into a single composition that is a tribute to the creative arts. The poems weave among the arts in small groups of two, four or more, each small group responding to paintings, sculpture, music, dance, theater or poetry. Imagine entering a gallery where the art is on the wall or on pedestals with music playing in the background, and suddenly dancers enter the gallery and bring movement to respond to the music; performance artists mimic poses in the sculpture. The flow moves from mood to mood, like moving on to rooms in a gallery where themes or styles are captured. The collection closes with a bit of self-effacing humor about poets and our pretensions. Overall, the book is not structured enough to be considered a symphony, but it is an integrated composition.
“For Art’s Sake opens to a garden of creation: music, sculpture, painting and dance in Curt Curtin’s beautifully crafted poems …[The collection] roots us in earth and through art, opens us to joy.”
–Susan Roney O’Brien, Bone Circle
“Profoundly imaginative and subtle, tender, alive with colours and tones, sensitive to mood and nuance, coaxing ‘unuttering’ art to utter– these are marvelous poems.”
–John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?
Read “About Joy and Suffering, He Is Never Wrong” below, a book review by Judith Ferrara where she shares, “Curtin’s work is “sublimely human. Sublime because Curtin’s awe is palpable in the poems, human because he strives to reconnect readers with their senses through his.”
Copies of Kerry Dancers are available at independent bookstores including:
- Annie’s Book Stop (Worcester)
- Bedlam Books (Worcester)
- Tidepool Books (Worcester)
- Booklover’s Gourmet (Webster)
- The Book Loft (G.Barrington)
Poetry by Curt Curtin 