Soutine

Poetry. Rick Mullin's SOUTINE is a multilayered marvel of a book. Its two protagonists are the Jewish expressionist painter, Chaïm Soutine, and the author himself, also an artist, but one who has had to make more common compromises with the world. These partial biographies are turned for us in the liveliest terza rima you are likely to find in contemporary poetry, rhyme rich, playful and tragic almost in the same breath. More than a meditation on art and ambition, SOUTINE celebrates both painting and poetry, while lamenting the limits on our lives. Mullin uses words with such color and plasticity, such concern for the joys and failures of the flesh, that his poem feels like a world remade--or nearly so--against the most terrible odds. Read this book for its verbal panache, its knowledge of painterly technique, but most of all for its unvarnished engagement with life.--David Mason