Whispers in the Gallery To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. Written during a serious illness, the poems in Whispers in the Gallery arose from the author’s meditations on timeless masterpieces as he wandered through a virtual art gallery. While the poems are ekphrastic in that they serve to describe and interpret the pieces, they go beyond this, responding to the whispers emanating from these rich and evocative artworks. Titian, Bosch, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Monet, and other masters of brush and canvas emerge alongside masters of other media: Homer, Gesualdo, Beethoven, Melville, and more. From the origins of human imagination and the images evoked by painting and music, to the oddities of anatomy and biology; from the strange fish caught by one trolling the depths, to the great plagues sweeping through history, these poems strike a match in the dark gallery of the unconscious. With each stop in this gallery of the mind, readers eavesdrop on the poet’s dialogue with what has been awoken from the unconscious and given voice in the form of a poem. As the collection maps the author’s own path of individuation, at the same time, it invites and challenges readers to navigate their own. ART / General ISBN: 978-1-971191-29-4 (print; softcover; perfect bound) Released August 18, 2026 | Copyright 2026 94 pages; 29 full-color images |
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Mathew V. Spano has published poetry, short stories, and essays over the last twenty-five years, many of which are included in his books Hellgrammite (BLAST Press, 2016); Imps (BLAST Press, 2018); Casting Through Life (Kelsay Books, 2025); and Whispers in the Gallery (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2026). His work has appeared in various publications, such as The Los Angeles Times, Psychological Perspectives, Turtle Island Quarterly, Quantum Fairy Tales, The Yellow Chair Review, Frogpond, Cicada, Modern Haiku, This Broken Shore, The Heron’s Nest, as well as in anthologies, such as Palisades, Parkways & Pinelands (Blast Press, 2016); Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); and The Poets of New Jersey: From Colonial to Contemporary (Jersey Shore Publications, 2005). He has taught English Composition and Mythology in Literature as a full-time professor for over twenty-five years at Middlesex College in Edison, New Jersey, where he now serves as the English Department Chair. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, his dissertation focusing on the works of pioneering psychologist Carl Jung and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse. Mat lives with his wife, Stephanie, and their two children in central New Jersey. |
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“As I mused about the poems [in this collection], their leaps, their shape shifts, their intricate music, their powerful, often nightmarish imagery, the Magician from the Marseilles Tarot deck appeared to my inner eye. You know the one. He has a big floppy hat, a wand in his left hand, a gold coin in his right. Before him is a table with the tools of his trade. He is about to give us a performance—some sort of sleight of hand. The aliveness and eloquence of these silent objects, the meaning they make in the wild play of imagination, moving the painter as well as the poet, bring us back full circle . . . to [the archetypal] Magician—working his eternal magic through Cézanne as well as through Spano.” |
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