For Art's Sake opens to a garden of creation, music, sculpture, painting and dance bloom in Curt Curtin's beautifully crafted poems. In "after Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts, '" Icarus transforms to Private Icarus "blown skyward by a bomb." In "Shaping," Michelangelo's David, "a stone/with a boy inside" becomes Curtin's "a child with a stone inside" and in "Bach's Magnificat," the canticle sounds from the abandoned interior of Northampton State Hospital while former patients and others listen. For Art's Sake roots us in earth and through art, opens us to joy.-Susan Roney-O'Brien, educator and author of Bone Circle, Legacy of the Last World, and several other poetry collections; convener, Thirsty Lab Poetry Reading, Princeton, MAProfoundly imaginative and subtle, tender, alive with colours and tones, sensitive to mood and nuance, coaxing "unuttering" art to utter-these are marvellous poems.John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford, literary critic and author of over a dozen books including What Good Are the Arts? The loss of one's sight has for poets, often opened the eyes to, as Milton put it, that inner "second sight" which then discovers new perspectives about our world. So with Curt Curtin who uses his inner sight to illuminate Old Masters of art and music through a far different lens than we sighted ones, such as this excerpt from his poem "Chickadee" "...her quick and undulating flight, so like a line of quarter notes in the sky...."Rodger Martin, author of The Battlefield Guide and two other poetry collections; teacher, editor, journalist; director of Monadnock Pastoral Poets of New Hampshire
