Columbus poet Kendall Dunkelberg will publish his third collection, titled “Barrier Island Suite,” in March.
The poems tell the story of Mississippi artist Walter Inglis Anderson as seen through his logs and his artwork. A well-known artist working in water color, charcoal, pen and ink, sculpture and murals, Anderson lived in Ocean Springs, where he designed and decorated ceramics at the family’s Shearwater Pottery and weeks at a time camped out on Horn Island and the other barrier islands, observing, drawing and painting the local plants, animals, and birds and chronicling his experiences in copious logs.
Early in life, Anderson had suffered from depression and had been institutionalized. He had studied at art school and traveled to France, Spain, Central America, Japan and China. The poems in this collection explore Anderson’s unique artistic vision and the liminal space that he inhabited between land and sea, between nature and culture and between madness and conformity.
Dunkelberg is professor of English at Mississippi University for Women, where he directs the low-residency master of fine arts program in creative writing and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium.
He has published two previous books of poetry, “Landscapes and Architectures,” and “Time Capsules,” as well as a collection of translations of the Belgian poet Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu and Nostradamus. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including China Grove, Poetry South and Valley Voices and in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume II: Mississippi and Down to the Dark River.
“Barrier Island Suite” will be available in March from Texas Review Press and may be preordered at most bookstores or through the Texas Book Consortium, tamupress.org. More information is available on the author’s website, kendalldunkelberg.com.
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