Jason Gray – författare

Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur. The poems are always attentive to artistic mediums and the craft behind them because our struggle is to make something perfect in the imperfect world in which we live, while acknowledging the impossibility of that quest. Gray's poems range all over, from adventures in Egyptian ruins with machine-gun-toting tourist police to the western edge of the foggy Irish coastline, and to the mythic past, where Adam and Eve visit a zoo and Eden has become a nature preserve.

Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur. The poems are always attentive to artistic mediums and the craft behind them because our struggle is to make something perfect in the imperfect world in which we live, while acknowledging the impossibility of that quest. Gray's poems range all over, from adventures in Egyptian ruins with machine-gun-toting tourist police to the western edge of the foggy Irish coastline, and to the mythic past, where Adam and Eve visit a zoo and Eden has become a nature preserve.

Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur. The poems are always attentive to artistic mediums and the craft behind them because our struggle is to make something perfect in the imperfect world in which we live, while acknowledging the impossibility of that quest. Gray's poems range all over, from adventures in Egyptian ruins with machine-gun-toting tourist police to the western edge of the foggy Irish coastline, and to the mythic past, where Adam and Eve visit a zoo and Eden has become a nature preserve.

“Jason Gray’s How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women’s bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, ‘what is heavenly for what is Heaven.’”— Andrew Hudgins“Jason Gray ends his sequence ‘Meditations of the Tomb Painters’ with the lines: ‘Here is my heart in paint, a stowaway / Inside the art that only God would see.’ And indeed, in all of Gray’s work there is a sense that the heart, the faithful and abiding heart, is best (and most safely) transported via the artifice of poetry. From the heart-wrenching, blank-verse ekphrastic ‘My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel… ’ to the heartily clever nonce ‘You Put Your Right Hand In… , ’ this is work that is always worshipful of its medium.”— Kathy Fagan“The ekphrastic poems in How to Paint the Savior Dead celebrate and enact the power of words to exhume a living body—a human’s or a god’s—from the stilled depths of the painted image. Jason Gray, a chiaroscurist drawn to the drama at the border between light and dark, the seen and the hidden, and the sacred and the profane, writes wisely, wryly, wonderfully, and, at times, wickedly about the ‘common beauty’ of the quotidian and the ‘mundane miracle’ of the divine.”— Eric Pankey

“Jason Gray’s How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women’s bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, ‘what is heavenly for what is Heaven.’” — Andrew Hudgins“Jason Gray ends his sequence ‘Meditations of the Tomb Painters’ with the lines: ‘Here is my heart in paint, a stowaway / Inside the art that only God would see.’ And indeed, in all of Gray’s work there is a sense that the heart, the faithful and abiding heart, is best (and most safely) transported via the artifice of poetry. From the heart-wrenching, blank-verse ekphrastic ‘My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel . . .’ to the heartily clever nonce ‘You Put Your Right Hand In. . . ,’ this is work that is always worshipful of its medium.” — Kathy Fagan