“These poems hit with force […] a lived texture of doubt, damage and longing, rendered with clarity and physical weight.” ~ Seán Kissane
From John Singer Sargent to Francis Bacon and Keith Haring – covering romantic landscapes and surreal portraits – Masters curates a gallery of writing in response to paintings by queer men. Mark Ward’s voice inks that of the artist, the subject, and the viewer across poems exploring desire, grief, shame, defiance and surrender.
Tender and daring, Masters goes in search of a shared queer male history across the past century, and invites us to look more deeply at the worlds beneath and beyond the brushstrokes.
Featuring poems about artworks by Bernard Perlin, Denis Wirth-Miller, Edward Burra, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Francis Bacon, Gerard Dillon, Henry Bishop, Henry Robertson Craig, Henry Scott Tuke, Jasper Johns, Jared French, John Singer Sargent, Keith Haring, Keith Vaughn, Patrick Hennessy, Patrick Proctor, Pavel Tchelitchew, Philip Core, Vivian Forbes and Yannis Tsarouchis.
Praise for Masters
“These stunningly executed poems achieve what the best ekphrastic work does – they open windows into worlds both strange and familiar, vividly evoked in Ward’s pitch-perfect poems. Skillfully ventriloquising the voices of both artist and muse, and deeply rooted in intimate queer spaces, these poems are a testament to the subversive, sustaining and liberating qualities of art.”– Jessica Traynor, author of New Arcana
“These poems hit with force. They don’t flirt with metaphor or posture at cleverness. They expose. Ward writes from the gut, reaching for words to match the intensity of looking, of feeling, of remembering. There is sex, but it is ambivalent. There is romance, but it collapses. The body appears again and again: undressed, touched, shamed, adored, but never safely. What emerges is not a tidy narrative of queer life, but a lived texture of doubt, damage and longing, rendered with clarity and physical weight.”– Seán Kissane, Curator of Exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)
“Mark Ward’s Masters is a gallery of twenty queer artists, as if each painting opens a door to the complexities of desire. Ward gives voice to every brushstroke. He pinpoints passion with luscious phrase-making (‘a psalm in underwear’), lyrical imagery (‘Burn me for light. Lose a body in me’) and exciting variations of form, including a range of powerful sonnets. These poems play with the queer body as landscape, admitting the colours of shame and ambivalence alongside radical joy. Hands and skin, eyes and kisses dance, wrestle and swan-dive through Mark Ward’s singing lines.”– Robert Hamberger, author of Nude Against a Rock
