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Award-winning author, poet, and artist Clayton presents a new collection combining colorful visual imagery with her deft use of language and lore. The title refers to the Greek word for "healer," and as she says in her introduction, it also acknowledges her nephew, whose noble qualities inspired this creation. In her poetry, Clayton describes and praises the white hart, or deer, of legend, whose fabled roles include a symbolization of Christ's presence on earth. In this grouping, the first poem, "His Noblesse," is accompanied by a beautiful color painting of the white stag.
The aggregation ranges widely. For example, there is the suggestion, emphasized by a cluster of dawn-like yellow flowers, that sleep is "sweetest in the closing hours of the night" when "the rogues and highwaymen" have gone into hiding. A paean to "the lovely pomegranate and pear, together" shares pages with a depiction of purple fruits on curling branches, overflown by a graceful dove. Darkness, too, is represented poetically by hearts that "struggle and fall, bitter lamentations."
Clayton, a retired teacher and gifted sculptor, painter, and wordsmith, states that these particular works were written at a period of reflection and loss. Yet her beautifully crafted statuary and often sweet, floral pictures provide balance, with one large illustration for each short poem. In her prose opening and closing segments, she makes many allusions to classical literature and customs, inner journeying, and the human tendency to vacillate between extremes of thought and feeling. The sense that the reader and viewer will take from this melding of philosophy and picture is that its creator is an alchemist who can create ideas from a vast universe of images and pull pictures from an equally grand storehouse of ideas.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review