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A fresh twist on 24 classics, these visual interpretations by comic artist Julian Peters will change the way you see the world.
“By turns whimsical, chilling, and profound, Peters has created a wonderful anthology of classic poems new and old." — Gareth Hinds (The Iliad)
This stunning anthology of favorite poems visually interpreted by comic artist Julian Peters breathes new life into some of the greatest English-language poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
These are poems that can change the way we see the world, and encountering them in graphic form promises to change the way we read the poems. In an age of increasingly visual communication, this format helps unlock the world of poetry and literature for a new generation of reluctant readers and visual learners.
Grouping unexpected pairings of poems around themes such as family, identity, creativity, time, mortality, and nature, Poems to See By will also help young readers see themselves differently. A valuable teaching aid appropriate for middle school, high school, and college use, the collection includes favorites from the Western canon already taught in countless English classes.
Includes poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, William Ernest Henley, Robert Hayden, Edgar Allan Poe, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Philip Johnson, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tess Gallagher, Ezra Pound, and Siegfried Sassoon.
View Table of ContentsThis is a beautiful book that reimagines classic poems. I like the graphic novel format because it provides a new way to look at poetry that is more accessible to a lot of students. My students in particular are drawn to graphic novels as a format, and are more likely to pick up a book like this, which is why I bought it for my library. The illustrations are beautiful, and I really liked that the art style was slightly different for each poem and also matched the poems, in a way. This was a great addition to my library. One of the teachers at my school really liked it as well and found it to be helpful in her teaching of poetry.
In Poems To See By, comic artist Julian Peters introduces us to his visual translation of poems by such greats as Shelley and Yeats, Bishop and Angelou. The book cover introduces the artist’s purpose where a boy lifts a book toward an expansion of sea, sky, and stars beyond his personal space on a ship’s deck. In this collection, the artist renders his own response to great alphabetic texts through his rich visual language that expands and enriches each poem. Peters uses his comic art not only to pay tribute to the beauty of the selected poems but to “pull them in as close as possible.” We are struck by the artist’s personal vision as we move from the last page of his comic art to the traditional text of each poem, thus shaking up our response to poems with which we believed ourselves comfortably familiar. This stylistic arrangement upends our expectations and expands our discoveries, for example Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” that begins with a series of variously colored squares and rectangles that form bars, surprisingly empty of birds until the later panels. Image and word texts flow into each other to be absorbed into the reader’s experience. In “Musee des Beaux Arts,” a traditional ekphrastic poem, Auden engages Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus as a starting point for his contemplation of human suffering. In choosing Auden’s poem, Peters will turn this pattern around, as his visual panels engage the poem’s text, layering a rich juxtaposition of 16th century painting, 20th century poetry, and 21st century comic art, opening new avenues for the reader. In this unique collection, we are invited to see poems we meet for the first time or rediscover in new ways. As we respond to this interplay of visuals and texts, we obtain a new scope, both greater and yet more intimate, as we bring our own life touchstones, memories, and symbols to discover each poem’s expanded beauty and possibilities. This is a marvelous book.
