cover image Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry

Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry

Julian Peters. Plough, $24 (160p) ISBN 978-0-87486-318-5

Comic artist Peters adopts a distinct visual style for each poem in this English-language collection, then imagines a complex narrative to accompany it. For William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (“I am the master of my fate:/ I am the captain of my soul”), he creates a blocky, black-and-white sequence about a dramatic prison break. For Langston Hughes’s “Juke Box Love Song” (“Dance with you till day—/Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl”), tender watercolor portraits illuminate glowing city lights. Some of the black-and-white action of Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us” unfolds on a smartphone screen, while Tess Gallagher’s “Choices” evokes nature’s green in scribbly landscapes. It’s a romantic, backward-looking collection: few creators of color and living poets, nearly twice as many men’s voices as women’s, and, visually, lots of period costumes and Gothic atmospherics. The obvious appeal is for readers who might otherwise chafe at being assigned classic pieces of English literature; Peters’s work may help young readers grasp the sometimes archaic English (Hayden’s “austere and lonely offices,” for example). Final art not seen by PW. Ages 13–up. (Mar.)