Chuck Salmons won the 2011 William Redding Memorial Poetry Contest, sponsored by The Poetry Forum of Columbus, has garnered awards from Ohio Poetry Day, and is a recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for his poetry.
The modern ekphrastic poems in THE GRACE OF GAZING INWARD seek to engage in a conversation with artwork created by Alice Carpenter. Each poem responds to a particular monotype, an artform that incorporates aspects of painting and printmaking. Most of Carpenter's monotypes, which are printed alongside their respective poems, are very small (typically a few square inches) and very detailed landscapes where the moon is prominent. Through highly lyrical poems, Salmons considers such questions as identity, human relationships with nature and each other, and the nature of art. Each poem reflects, in form and content, the monotype it speaks to using fresh imagery, lines of brevity, and concise, spare language.
"'Given the choice, how would you enter the space, ' asks poet Chuck Salmons in his transcendent collection of ekphrastic poetry THE GRACE OF GAZING INWARD. Each poem is a skillful blend of observation, reverence, wonder and whispers, tight with insights that linger. The art is the words, the words are the art, at some point one easily loses track of which may have come first. Salmons has a gift for meter and turning a poem in adroitly ingenious directions, a poet who looks beyond the frame to consider what might exist 'out by the hard edge of the world.' This book is one to sit with, contemplate, savor." --Kari Gunter-Seymour
Poetry. Art.
