NIGHT AT THE MUSÉE D’ORSAY Poems of Paris and Other Great European Cities
Judy Wells
ISBN 13: 978-1-58790-640-4 / 1180 pages / paperback / 6”x9” / $22
ABOUT THE BOOK
Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities is a vibrant memoir of travel poems centering on Wells’ appreciation of well-known European painters, architects, writers, and musicians associated with great European cities. Although beauty is Wells’ major theme in her poetry collection, she also delves into the darker side of various artists’ lives and their works with depth and precision. In conjunction, Wells interweaves her own personal life into her travel poems, which illustrate her creative and emotional responses to her travels at different times in her life—from young adult in France to older woman confronting aging and mortality in Barcelona. Her poetry encompasses various poetic styles—lyric, narrative, and surprisingly for a book on European travels, even haiku.
Night at the Musée d’Orsay contains five sections: The first section, France, highlights artists in Paris—Van Gogh, Chagall, Renoir, Matisse and novelist Balzac. Italy, the second chapter, features poems about Rome, Orvieto, and Assisi, spotlighting contemporary organist Giampaolo Di Rosa in Rome, and Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli in Orvieto. The third section, Austria, contains poems on musicians Amadeus Mozart and his sister Nannerl, the architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and contemporary light artist Victoria Coeln, all in Vienna. The Czech Republic, the fourth chapter, features poems on the Renaissance and baroque city, Český Krumlov, and Franz Kafka in Prague. The final section, Spain, visits the Prado in Madrid with poems on Velázquez and Goya, and ends with a long poem on the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and his still incomplete sacred temple in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familía.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JUDY WELLS is a fourth generation San Francisco Bay Area Californian. She received her B.A. in French from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. She has twelve previous poetry books to her credit, including her exploration of her maternal Irish roots in her trilogy, Everything Irish and Call Home (Scarlet Tanager Books) and The Glass Ship (Sugartown Publishing). Her most recent collection, Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West (Sugartown), is a poetry/memoir about her paternal great-grandmother and her sisters, who came out to California in the early 1860s from Massachusetts to be pioneer schoolteachers. Judy’s research revealed she is indeed a distant cousin of Emily Dickinson.
Judy has read her poetry in many venues—from the famed bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris to the famed, now closed Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. She has also been a featured reader in several Berkeley Poetry Festivals. Her poetry has appeared in Veils, Halos, and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women; Women Write Resistance; Berkeley Times; San Francisco Peace and Hope; California Quarterly; Marin Poetry Center Anthology; Stanford Alumni Magazine; Psychological Perspectives; Persimmon Tree; Timberline Review; Levure littéraire; Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry and in many other journals.
She is also co-editor of The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon, McFarland, 2005, a chronicle of the founding of Women’s Studies in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. Her essays have appeared in Travelers’ Tales Ireland, The Borzoi College Reader, Value: Essays, Stories & Poems by Women of a Certain Age, and Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation.
Judy taught writing and literature at various Bay Area colleges before a career as an Academic Counselor for adults in the School of Extended Education at Saint Mary’s College of California, and as a faculty member of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Saint Mary’s. She also taught writing at UC Berkeley Extension in a special Fall program for Cal freshmen. She is an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon, and lives with her husband, avant-garde poet Dale Jensen, in Berkeley. www.judywellspoet.com