NEW YORK, NY.- On November 10, 2015, Prestel Publishing will release “Sunlight on the River: Poems about Paintings, Paintings about Poems.” This sumptuously illustrated books features more than 50 pairings of artworks and the poems they inspired, ranging across centuries and revealing the special shared vision of poets and painters.

This volume has been edited by Scott Gutterman, Deputy Director of the Neue Galerie New York and a distinguished writer on the arts, whose articles have appeared in Artforum, GQ, The New Yorker, Vogue, and other publications.

The poet and the artist possess an ability to see to the very essence of something, to penetrate its mysteries. The poetry of Homer had as its goal to make the listener envision scenes, to translate words into images. Across the centuries, poets and artists have often turned to one another’s work for inspiration, from Rainer Maria Rilke’s haunting verse on an ancient Greek sculpture to Wallace Stevens’s masterful meditation on a painting by Picasso.

“Sunlight on the River” explores various aspects of ekphrasis, the art of transformation from one medium into another. Additional examples include William Carlos Williams’s series of poems based on Breughel paintings and Delmore Schwartz’s interpretation of Georges Seurat’s iconic “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

The book presents each poem/painting combination on individual spreads, to allow for easy reference from one to the other. The effect is of a viewing gallery, in which the poem and the painting each carries equal weight. Together, they combine to form something dazzling—something that endures, as Rilke imagined, “as the arrow endures the string, / To form, in the gathering outleap, something greater than itself.”