Magpie on the Gallows

This anthology couldn’t be more timely in our toxic and increasingly disastrous world.

—Rae Armantrout, Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015; Go Figure

The works of Bosch and Bruegel are anchored firmly in the northern Renaissance but call forward beyond their originating context to speak directly to the terrors and joys of our current moment. The stunning, varied poems in this wide-ranging anthology all thrum with the reverberations of these paintings but like all great works of ekphrasis do not seek simply to reduplicate the artists’ images in words. Rather, these poems peer beyond the surfaces of their corresponding works to discover (or create) striking new textures and connections: A poem by Traci Brimhall gifts us a vulnerable, raw “alt-text” of Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, while Larry Levis plucks an invisible wren from the rowdy chaos of Bruegel’s depiction of Calvary. The explorations and meditations of the poems in this anthology are as vital as the classics that inspired them.

—Nick Lantz, The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That

Magpie on the Gallows: Poems on the Art of Bosch and Bruegel collects famous and newly minted poems on the art of Hieonymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. These painters from the Northern Renaissance are startlingly relevant today, with their critiques of authorities, exposure of church hypocrisies, and assault on holier-then-thou judgments. Though the artworks were created in the 1500’s—featuring surrealistic scenes from dreams and nightmares, illustrations of ancient proverbs, and close examination of natural landscapes and peasant life—they still mesmerize. Combining well-known poems—Sylvia Plath, Auden, William Carlos Williams, Sandra Gilbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, and others—with poems by some of the best recent poets: Mosa Abu Toha, Charles Simic, Kimiko Hahn, Kaveh Akbar, Rae Armantrout, Traci Brimhall, etc.—this anthology will delight fans of the artists, those interested in poetry, and the general public trying to comprehend our mad (and maddening!) world.

About the Editors

Margaret Allen Sullivan earned an MA in Art History at the University of Massachusetts, specializing in the satirists of the Northern Renaissance, particularly Bruegel and Bosch. She published numerous scholarly articles—on Bosch, Dürer, Holbein, etc.—and two books on Bruegel, which dramatically altered our understanding of the artist and the period: Bruegel’s Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance (1994), and Bruegel and the Creative Process, 1559-1563 (2017). Her work as an independent scholar initiated a paradigm shift into seeing Bruegel in the context of his times, and examined how he critiqued authorities obliquely, initiating a dialogue with ancient texts and satirists.

David Allen Sullivan is the former poet laureate of Santa Cruz county. His books include Strong Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, and Black Ice. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing, and Tim Seibles selected Black Butterflies Over Baghdad for the Hilary Tham capital collection. Light Thief, a book of poems and co-translations from various languages that examines motherhood, and the life and death of the author’s mother, is forthcoming, as well as a book of poems and co-translations based on his year as a Fulbright lecturer in Xi’an, China. He accompanied his mother to various museums around the world, and together they analyzed artwork, spending many hours in the Kunsthistorisches museum, Vienna; the Prado, Madrid; and many others—both abroad and in the US. https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-1

Paperback, 183 pages. ISBN: 978-1-257-07674-1

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This book was supported by a SAGA Grant from Spokane Arts.