The Arrangement of Things
Selected Poetry
by Anna Bat-Chai Wrobel
Published by Moon Pie Press,Westbrook, Maine 2018
Pages 89  Price $15

Maine poet Anna Bat-Chai Wrobel writes with sensitivity and grace about every day experiences. She has taught about the Holocaust across the state and specialized in that field.

She taught American History at Falmouth High School for 15 years. American history is a favorite topic.

Her poetry is in the Maine Jewish History exhibit at the Maine State Museum in Augusta currently. Her work is also in the Maine Governor’s Anthology for 2019. She has participated in USM Sage lectures. In addition, she   is giving a course on the Holocaust at the Maine Jewish Alliance in Portland currently.

Her work has been published in such poetry journals as the ”Cafe Review,” “Lilith, ”and “Jewish Currents.” She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and co-hosts “Lowry’s Lodge” poetry series with musician/writer Jim Donnelly.

As a guest lecturer she is dynamite. She doesn’t use notes, and speaks from the heart. Here is one example of a poem of significance in her book.

“The Student’s Gift”

the angle of vision
the arrangement of things
straight and clear
elliptical
obstructed
out of sight
shifting between
what’s open and closed
who do they see in me
what bronzed and hippie girl
not quite grounded
not quite gone
poems floating like a raft

the painting she gave me
is all color and golden
a Bierstadt luminosity
“your favorite words,” the note said
these imagined in sky and treetop
in trunk and earth
PEACE
JUSTICE
LOVE

If you like poetry and love the beauty of words placed together in sensitive patterns with unusual descriptive phrases, you will love this poet’s vision of life and want to read more of Anna Wrobel’s style. Hope you like this brief selection of the poetry found in the book “Arrangement of Things,” by Anna Wrobel and will look for it at your local book store or library. I loved her use of words and her message of peace, justice and love. Wrobel has the ability to paint in words like an artist paints in color.

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Thomas Crotty: A solitude of Space
by Francine Koslow Miller
Preface by Daniel E. O’Leary
Publ. by Down East Publishing and Portland Art Museum 2003
Pages 120  Price $40

Visual poetry can be found in the solitary Maine landscapes painted by the late Thomas Crotty of Freeport Maine. Crotty, a gifted artist and art dealer who lived in Maine for over 60 years, was born in 1943 and passed away in 2015.  However, he still lives on in his beautiful realistic paintings of the state and its unspoiled countryside.

When I look across the cold Maine landscape this winter, and see the stark stillness of its snow covered formations, I think “This could be a Tom Crotty  painting.”  In fact, as I drive to Biddeford to pick up the Journal Tribune Weekender, and cross the Scarborough marshes and see the trees and branches covered by snow with dried, tall, wispy grasses poking their way through the frozen earth, I think of a work by Crotty titled  “Cushing in Winter,” an oil on canvas painted in 1990  found on the cover of this book. Many of Crotty ’s works look like the Scarborough marshes this winter. They are sparse and starkly beautiful as they show snow melting and the earth coming to life again. His paintings are visual poems of nature and solitude.

This aesthetically designed hard cover book with many colored reproductions of Crotty’s work was originally created around a one- man exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art in 2002. Daniel O’Leary, former director of the Portland Museum of Art, said in his introduction to the book and art catalogue, “Crotty’s works reveal the devotion of an artist who has entrusted his career to the fundamental principle of the miracle of Maine light. For Crotty, perhaps more than any other artist of his era, that light ebbs and flows with extraordinary grace, and is transformed not only by each season, but by every hour.”

Works in this book which are outstanding speak for themselves and include:”Cushing in Winter,”oil on canvas (1990), “Wolfe’s Neck,” oil on canvas 1992, and “Pleasant Hill Road,”oil on canvas 2000, to name only a few. Many people did not know that Crotty could do portraits. An early portrait seen in this book of his son, Donald, around the age of eight in 1969 is better than the portraits of Andrew Wyeth. You can see in this portrait a touch of poetry.

Crotty was a highly respected artist and art dealer who owned the Frost Gully Gallery in Maine for over 50 years. He owned one of the first art galleries in the city of Portland on Exchange Street, as well as an art gallery in the barn of  his home in Freeport in 1966. He loved Maine and helped other artists by showing their works in his gallery. Some of the artists he helped in his gallery were: Cabot Lyford, Bernard Langlais, Dahlov Ipcar, David Driskell, Lawrence Sisson, Stephen Etnier, Martha Groome, Beverly Hallam, Pat Hardy, John Laurent, and many more.The Frost Gully Gallery was known as a serious art collector’s gallery. It was not a tourists’ gallery. In fact it was hard to find. But serious art lovers knew where he was located.

Crotty  loved the open spaces he found in Maine which he painted in his works. He also loved the sea and had a huge sailboat which he raced professionally during competitions on the New England sea coast.  His work reflects his spartan nature and his fearless love of solitude as well as his no- nonsense personality. He did not care for small talk but was down to earth and friendly with those he liked. For me, he was the Clint Eastwood of the art world in Maine. He never wasted a word. Although quiet and reserved, I think he would consider the comparison to Eastwood as a compliment. I meant it as one. This book brings to life an important artist of Maine who should not be forgotten. You can find it in libraries, and it is still available at the Portland Museum of Art and at Down East Publishing Company.

— Pat Davidson Reef is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston. She received her Masters Degree at the University of Southern Maine.She taught English and Art History at Catherine McAuley High for many years.She now teaches at the University of Southern Maine in Portland in the  Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Classic Films. She recently wrote a children’s book,”Dahlov Ipcar Artist, and is now writing another children’s book “Bernard Langlais Revisited.”