2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
LESSONS IN PERSPECTIVE a review by Grace Horne Michael White. Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir. New York: Persea Books, 2015.
GRACE HORNE has a BA in English from UNC Chapel Hill and an MA from East Carolina University where she has taught English since 2004. MICHAEL WHITE, currently head of the MFA Program at UNC Wilmington, has published four volumes of poetry, Vermeer in Hell (Persea Books, 2014), Re-entry (U of North Texas P, 2006; reviewed in NCLR 2007), Palma Cathedral (UP of Colorado, 1998; reviewed in NCLR 1999), and The Island (Copper Canyon Press, 1993). His honors include the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Prize, the Vassar Miller Prize, and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. And this new memoir was among the long-list finalists for the National Book Award. Read some of is poetry in NCLR 2004 and 2009.
ABOVE RIGHT Michael White in front of one of two Vermeers at the Louvre in Paris, France, July 2014
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part art history and analysis, Travels in Vermeer by poet Michael White revisits and examines White’s demons – abandonment, addiction, loss, and grief – and shares his discovery of the consoling and healing power of art during a year-long journey to view twenty-four paintings by Johannes Vermeer. White travels to Amsterdam on spring break to put an “ocean behind” him and the nastiness of a pending divorce and begins what he labels his “transformation . . . courtesy of Johannes Vermeer” (13). This transformation begins after viewing Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, housed in the Rijksmuseum, where White experiences “a shiver all the way up and down [his] spine” and intuits that Vermeer’s paintings can help him make meaning of his unhinged life (20). Departing the Rijksmuseum, White outlines an itinerary to visit the seven other museums where the additional Vermeers are on view. As White journeys to The Hague, Washington, DC, New York, and London to see the paintings that will “transform” him, he obsessively prepares to view each painting by reading and studying the experts on Vermeer, most notably, Sir Lawrence Gowing, Kees Kaldenbach, and Edward Snow. From these experts, White learns about the technical elements of the paintings, such as how Vermeer achieved the luminous quality associated with his paintings as well as how Vermeer transports viewers with his use of perspective. Ultimately, perspective seems to have the strongest hold on White’s imagination and
COURTESY OF MICHAEL WHITE
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is one of many reasons for the “uncanny solace” (66) of Vermeer’s figures and interiors. Between visits to museums, we accompany White as he reflects on his disrupted childhood, his stint in the Navy, his recognition of and his recovery from alcoholism, his first wife’s death, and the relationship of these life events to his perceptions about the power of love and art and of the mystery of Vermeer’s paintings, which “broke over [him] like a wave, mercy and equipoise, hit dead center in a soul in serious need of them” (65). This need inspires intense reactions to most of the paintings. Ironically or not, White has the most complicated reactions to the females in the paintings, as if studying them for clues to his own problematic histories with women. Along White’s journey, we are invited to view the paintings with him and his descriptions of them are evocative and detailed. In language that has been described as “lyrical” and “sensuous,”1 White’s descriptions most often focus
1
“A Memoir Exploring How Johannes Vermeer’s Paintings Bestow Bountiful Gifts,” Kirkus Reviews 20 Nov 2014: web.