Melea J. Brock

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Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry
by Julian Peters
These are poems that can change the way we see the world, and encountering them in graphic form promises to change the way we read the poems. In an age of increasingly visual communication, this format helps unlock the world of poetry and literature for a new generation of reluctant readers and visual learners.

Grouping unexpected pairings of poems around themes such as family, identity, creativity, time, mortality, and nature, Poems to See By will also help young readers see themselves differently. A valuable teaching aid appropriate for middle school, high school, and college use, the collection includes favorites from the Western canon already taught in countless English classes.

Includes poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, William Ernest Henley, Robert Hayden, Edgar Allan Poe, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Philip Johnson, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tess Gallagher, Ezra Pound, and Siegfried Sassoon.

Melea’s Review

“This is a unique book! It’s as easy as it sounds – illustrated poems. 24 British and American Poets: Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, William Ernest Henley, Robert Hayden, Edgar Allan Poe, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Philip Johnson, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tess Gallagher, Ezra Pound, and Siegfried Sassoon. Did you hear a favorite poet|poetess in this list?

As one person said, “Peters has assembled 24 poems and organized them into six “seeing” categories – yourself, others, art, nature, time, and death.”

This will be a book that you’ll want to sit down and read aloud with someone – take your time sharing the pages and their words – one poem at a time. It could be a one-of-a-kind gift for a “someone special” that you’d like to be closer to. I, personally, will be sharing this book with my 20-something daughter. It will be a BIG leap for some – “Illustrated poems?!” And not a leap for others.”

About The Author

Julian Peters is a comics artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. He earned a master’s degree in art history from Concordia University with a thesis focusing on two early experimental graphic novels, Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti (1969) and Martin Vaughn-James’s The Projector (1971). His debut collection of adaptations of classic English-language poems into comics, Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry, was published by Plough in 2020. Peters is at work on a follow-up volume to this book as well as a comics adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.