The Night Watch
Poetry
Kelsay Books, 2025
$20.00, 58 pages ISBN: 978-1-63980-802-1
Poems of the Winter Palace
Poetry
Bottlecap Press, 2025
$10.00, 33 pages
One of the true pleasures of reading Barbara Krasner’s delightful ekphrastic poems, so vividly on display in her chapbook, Poems of the Winter Palace and her collection, The Night Watch, as if hung in a gallery, is googling the paintings that inspired the verses, contemplating the leaps of imagination and memory that resulted in her words. Take, for example, her poem “Dollar Princess on the Palazzo” from The Night Watch, after the nineteenth century Victorian painter Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June, a painting of a young woman in an orange gown, curled asleep in a chair, dreaming. It’s a charming, vivid image, the woman’s sinuous figure almost snakelike on the furniture. Sound asleep (drunk or just exhausted?), she’s apparently escaped a ball and is reposing in delicious seclusion from the party. Krasner starts her poem by identifying this model as “This ripe apricot” and contrasts the laced-up, made-up, confined girl we see with her dreams of abandon, escape:
Let her hair fall loosely where it blends with blankets,
not braided and spun in the day’s fashion,
body draped in exotic thoughts,
travel the world without a trunk, dive into the sea,
close her eyes to the heat on a camel in the desert,
not confined by corset and bustle.
Krasner’s imagination takes her to her family, to her youth, to the classroom, to clothing, to war, as well as to the narratives inspired by the scenes in the paintings themselves. “Antwerp Fish Stall,” for instance, a prose poem based on Franz Snyder’s seventeenth century painting, Fish Stall, viscerally reproduces the scene of seafood heaped for sale in the marketplace, already starting to rot. You can almost smell it!
Tossed from straw baskets, Earth and Water’s children land on the fish
stall’s table to be displayed for purchase. The fish—the sturgeon, cod,
salmon—already glassy-eyed. Dead. Some already butchered. The seal,
tortoise, and neighborhood dogs take delight in finding an easy meal.
She goes on to describe the crustaceans and the eel, “the delicacy’s silvery surface.” “Open the Gates” is another poem describing the port city of Antwerp, this one after Peter Paul Rubens’ Union of Earth and Water (Antwerp and Scheldt), from the same period.
The fifty-some ekphrastic pieces that make up these two books, mostly poems but some haibun and prose pieces, too, are all inspired by paintings in various museums around the world, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and other fine arts museums in New York and Paris. While both collections consider paintings from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, the bulk of The Winter Palace paintings are from the seventeenth, and it’s the nineteenth that dominate the poems in The Night Watch – the Impressionists, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, etc.
Krasner, who has a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies and has written novels in verse about Ethel Rosenberg and the tragedy of the Jewish refugee ship that was turned away from the United States when the Nazis were ramping up their persecution of the Jews (37 Days at Sea: Aboard the MS St. Louis, 1939), includes some poems in both collections that address the Holocaust and her Jewish ancestry. In The Night Watch, Krasner alludes to Anne Frank in “The Louvre May Have Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, But the Rijksmuseum Has Rembrandt’s The Night Watch” (from which the collection takes its name):
Who protects Amsterdam in the spring of 1940?
A young girl writes in her diary
with dim lamplight, no daylight allowed.
Later in the book, “When Russian Tunics Were the Rage Before World War I,” after Ferdinand Hodler’s Portrait of Werner Miller, Krasner writes about Miller staring out of his portrait like her grandmother’s cousin, Moishe Adler, did, one of the “tunic-clad boys who played with metal soldiers.”
A tunic gave them movement, even if belted.
This spurs a memory of her great-aunt Doba, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic, who was born and lived in Russia, who also wore a tunic. She ends the poem:
When I met with Moishe, now Murray, in Manna del Rey, he wore a blue
plaid sports coat, the tunic, like his parents and sister, rounded up in
Vienna and shot upon arrival in Minsk, a tucked-away memory.
The tunic also appears in “Fiddler as Witness,” an allusion to Fiddler on the Roof, a poem after Marc Chagall’s The Green Violinist:
My grandfather
floats above the wooden huts
of Borisov, heads west from Minsk
to America, exchanges his belted tunic
for a western suit, his carpentry
tools for the assembly line.
“Wildflowers,” in Poems of the Winter Palace, after the nineteenth century German painter Ludwig Knaus’s Girl in a Field, alludes to the blood libel in a 1928 incident in upstate New York in which a little girl wanders
into the forest. The locals believe her missing
and accuse the local Jewish community
of killing her for her blood. An investigation launches.
She turns up a few days later.
The painting shows a little girl wearing a red cap concentrating on the flowers she is plucking in a field, a peaceful, innocent scene if there ever was one. Who could have imagined the barbarism lurking just behind that serenity?
Krasner also writes about her father in “My Father Smoked the Seventeenth Century,” after Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Syndics, alluding to a Dutch Masters cigar box now used to store artifacts:
His parents’ citizenship papers,
a Waterman pen, a gold ring
with the Hebrew inscription,
“Pesia,” the name of the grandmother
he never met.
In “Gertrude’s of South Orange,” after Édouard Manet’s Before the Mirror, she writes of her parents at her wedding, the royal blue dress her mother bought for the occasion, her father who “guided his queen down / the red carpet of brick stairs / to the Cadillac.” The poem ends wistfully:
She held her head high, straightened
her back and shoulders until
osteoporosis and widowhood took hold
and the most valued crown jewel an inhaler.
But perhaps Krasner’s tenderest, most poignant poems are about her older sister, both from The Night Watch, “The Older and Younger,” after nineteenth century painter James Tissot’s The Two Sisters, and “Twenty-three Skidoo,” after John Sloan’s early twentieth century painting, Dust Storm. Both are sentimental memories of her big sister, after whom, as a younger sibling, the poet modeled herself. She followed her older sister into publishing. They both studied German. They both dated boys named Mike.
“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” played
at her wedding. Only I knew
she wanted me to be her
maid of honor, but there were
two sisters between us.
No umbrella could shield me
from the chasm our mother’s death
created. My sister closed the book
on my outstretched fingers until
she started on Mounjaro.
So did I.
Mounjaro is a medication taken for diabetes. As in “Gertrude’s of South Orange,” Krasner highlights the poignance of the passage of time, the frailties of the human body. For me, this brings to mind the final four-line poem in Poems of the Winter Palace, “Winter,” after Pieter Brueghel’s sixteenth century painting, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Snare, which depicts skaters on a frozen river, snow-capped homes looming on the shore:
The fine line between living and dying
forges in the blade of an ice skate,
deciding moment by moment
when the edge will make the difference.
My favorite poem from these two ekphrastic collections may be “Be Careful What You Ask For,” from The Night Watch, after John Singer Sargent’s Madame X. You read it and you just have to find that painting!
The gown’s thin straps are so scandalous
that Madame wants to pull the portrait
from the salon. But this is not what her
portraitist first painted.
That right strap,
resting in the nest
between neck and shoulder,
once draped lazily across the upper arm.
Her skin is almost blue, maybe purple.
The bodice a bustier the skirt black satin.
Her embarrassment
his best work.
Go ahead! Google the painting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Madame_X. The 1884 portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, wife of the French banker Pierre Gautreau, was something of a scandal at the Paris Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Its critics called the painting “vulgar” and “over-sexualized.” According to the Musée d’Orsay, it is now regarded as the “Mona Lisa of the American art collection conserved by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
These two books, The Night Watch and Poems of the Winter Palace, complement each other. They could almost be included between the same two covers. Readers with a taste for art will appreciate both. All poetry lovers will marvel at Krasner’s words.