These Flecks of Color: New and Selected Poems
Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda
POETRY
These Flecks of Color: New and Selected Poems is an art and word lover’s feast. The book includes poems from six of the author’s previous collections: Contrary Visions; Gathering Light; Death Comes Riding; Greatest Hits: 1981 – 2000; River Country; and The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, winner of the 2014 Art in Literature: The Mary Lynn Kotz Award. Highlighted in the final section of These Flecks of Color are twenty-four new poems.
The book addresses a range of topics, including nature, environmental problems, as well as insights gleaned from traveling to Bolivia, Kenya, Peru, Africa, and an array of European countries. Other poems reflect on the paintings of world-renowned artists, such as Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. In the words of George Mason University professor, Dr. Rei Berroa, “No one escapes the powerful word-sculpturing of Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda.” The lyricism of her work and her willingness to immerse herself into the intricacies of life are praiseworthy.
"Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda’s poems strike the ear along with the intelligence, evoking the natural world, visual art, and questions of self, transcendence, and responsibility, in the lyric mode. Her poems embrace the great subjects of the lyric: the intense, intuitive, and revelatory relationships that one thinking person can effect through observation, memory, and experience. . . . This poet is also doubly gifted, doubly trained, and brings a painter’s eye to the task of words. . . . Kreiter-Foronda’s poems remind us that seeing has its own way of meaning, and knowledge can arise from immersed observation as clearly as from overt acts of thinking. Her poems develop an idea of individual responsibility in relation to what is natural. In moments of intense emotion time is stilled, yet expands; these poems open like flowers with illuminated moments of double vision, inviting and challenging us to look again, revise our cursory sight and think more deeply."
Cathryn Hankla, “Redoubled Visions: Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda’s Lyrics”
Four Virginia Poets Laureate (2004-2012)
Edited by Sofia M. Starnes