Book cover art helps sets a mood for the poetry within, inviting readers to enter into a world of tone and color different from their everyday surroundings. Cover art should be an authentic expression of human emotion and creativity, just as poetry should be. I would never use AI or commercial clip art for a book cover--not when a book cover is such a fabulous opportunity to form a collaboration in artistic expression. I commissioned the painting on the cover of my first poetry book, Wild Earth (Antrim House) from local Vermont artist Katherine Carleton. My Facebook friend Petra Berntsson -- from Sweden, now living in Ireland -- gave me the license for the cover of my second poetry book, Elegy for the Trees (Kelsay Books). My friend and amazing photographer Jon-Marc Seimon licensed two of his black and white photos of Rome to me and helped with knowledgeable insights on the cover design for Mosaic: Poems from Travels in Italy.
Yesterday's email brought me the cover design for my next poetry book, coming out this spring from Finishing Line Press: Love in a Time of Climate Change. Evading rising temperatures last summer, we stayed in Ålesund, Norway with our daughter, son-in-law and baby granddaughter. We stumbled into the Galleri Artifex, a magical antiques and art shop owned by Nils Arild Nygård. We bought some fun little things but were enchanted by the artwork, particularly a series of haunting landscapes, each punctuated by a couple clinging so tightly to one another than they form a narrow, v-shaped silhouette, moving through the world as one.
We returned to look at the paintings again, and learned that the artist is Nils' father, Stein Kåre Nygård. Like a poem, Stein's paintings bridge between seen and unseen, between realism and spiritualism, between love and leaf. We bought a small piece, but my mind could not let go of this image, which was a much larger work that we simply don't have a wall big enough to hang in our tiny Vermont house.
When Finishing Line accepted my manuscript for Love in a Time of Climate Change, however, I desperately wanted this precise image on the cover: Two people, entangled, walking forward into the autumn of life, and an uncertain future. The autumn forest is beautiful and luminous, but also precarious. Winter, and harsh ungolden starkness, waits over the hill. How can two people walk this rocky uphill path together, and not stumble or be pulled apart?
I am bursting with gratitude that Stein Kåre Nygård graciously authorized me to use the image of this painting which had such a profound effect on me, and that his son Nils Arild Nygård took the time to photograph the painting and coordinate the necessary paperwork with his father. These are the human linkages, the ties that bind us through art and words, across seas, across miles, across years and generations. This is the authentic human joy of creative souls working in collaboration and beauty, enriching our experience of the world. This is, to me, what gives our lives meaning.
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