“Mine is the realm of the beautiful,” avers the speaker boldly in “Touch of Greek Inspiration,” a poem in Abraham Terian’s recently published anthology, Phrasing the Arts (The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2025). Indeed, the whole spectrum of the arts — music, dance, painting, sculpting — populates the pages of Terian’s “little book.”
Sibelius, Mendelssohn and Dvorak are ever-present. “Dear Vincent is always in my mind.” Terian seduces with his elegant language and images that delight with their sudden twists: “I see the light of setting suns/Here’s the ashtray,” “I’m waiting like a catcher with a mitt/for the sinking sun,” “You have high moments, even when low/just like the waves.” What holds the reader captive, however, is the almost shocking relevance of his words to real life, their bearing on the “unknowable pain” buried in the heart. In “Sinai Lunaris,” “It’s a dead-end even here” whispers the moon, with tearful eyes, to the pilgrim ascending Mount Sinai “unmoved,/its granite heart untouched,/unaware of the thousands/on the upward move —”
Terian’s poems reach into something profound. The beautiful artifacts and the various arts the speaker experiences carry him far into the reality of the soul, their enduring beauty prompting him to ponder the truth about humankind “roaming aimlessly,” like Moses, “in pathless places.” The Picasso painting at The Art Institute of Chicago shifts his attention to “the puzzled crowd/moving through the hall.” The violin chords of the Mozart Requiem he hears in “On a Walk in the Neighborhood” sound like “Someone was baring her soul . . . sounds from without and within.” As he further contemplates the “shattered pieces [of the] broken hoofs still kicking” of the marble frieze at the British Museum, “the guard/won’t let [him] touch,” he discerns what the sculptor touched but “never saw — your mortal wounds.” The whole collection can, in fact, be seen as the poet’s attempt to reveal the soul. “Hold nothing holier than the human soul,” reads the notice in his “Nursing-Home Notice.”
“A Stroll in Katajanokka Park,” a favorite among favorites, captures many truths about human life. Its succession of images evokes the lack of connection and the weariness in the everyday lives of the woman “tired of her shopping bag,” or the grandmother strolling her “toddler around/near pigeons for whom he doesn’t care.” The poem brilliantly evokes a life where “Dry leaves whirl with the wind/here and there and here/there:”
An old man sleeps on a bench
