John Reibetanz’s collection of ekphrastic poems, Everyday Light, is an illuminating guide to the Dutch master painters, both honoring their enduring artistry while projecting through a modern sensibility what the images convey. Upon a close reading of this rich text, I recognized my earlier framing of the Dutch scenes as lifelike while somewhat static. What Reibetanz uncovers for readers and viewers, who should interpret the poems and the art in a dual fashion, is how the Dutch painters “specialize in what’s unseen” – how they “peel layers of misogynistic myth from [the] domestic scene.” This myth is dispelled in the portraitures of women “free to compose a world of [their] own.” As a woman’s eyes “focus laser-like” and as she moves her hands, guided by heart and soul, we hear the “swish of the pen as its whispers encourage boldness” and witness the “winged quill” as it “gives[notes] weight and shape on the ruled lines of the sheet of paper.” In this book of poems, as is true in the paintings completed so long ago, women are not muted or passive recipients but curious decipherers and reinventors of the world around them.
This myth is dispelled in the portraitures of women “free to compose a world of [their] own.” As a woman’s eyes “focus laser-like” and as she moves her hands, guided by heart and soul, we hear the “swish of the pen as its whispers encourage boldness” and witness the “winged quill” as it “gives[notes] weight and shape on the ruled lines of the sheet of paper.”
Both the day-to-day vocation of a woman’s life and the future of a female child are channeled through a vessel of intermittent hope. In Reibetanz’s recreation of de Hooch’s “The Bedroom,” the mother aspires to a life of promise for her female child, who holds the handle of the door, not in a closed space, but in a “line of open doors…letting in realms of light.” The motif of light, further, moves across the palette, not as an accessory exclusive to heavenly angels, but like a secular “halo” “crowning [a] golden-boy’s devotion” to his dog or a mother’s “caressing [a]smiling child.” The aura belongs to those whose love “completes a circle of care.”
The motif of light, further, moves across the palette, not as an accessory exclusive to heavenly angels, but like a secular “halo” “crowning [a] golden-boy’s devotion” to his dog or a mother’s “caressing [a]smiling child.”
There are boundless gifts in this collection – the way Reibetanz draws our attention to the smallest details we might have overlooked in the paintings’ online representations, details that invite us to interact with the art: the “flame-shaped single soundhole…on the bass viol”;” the lustful rabbit on the ground”; the distant windmill and the village spire.” This invitation to look and re-read intently extends to Reibetanz’s application of poetic devices. In “Grace” drawn from Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance,” the featured pregnant woman’s cape “billows out bell-like/ in a secular annunciation/proclaiming the beginnings of new life,/all human, sprung from human affection.” The reader first envisions the likeness of the bell’s bulbous body to the woman’s nascent physique. With successive readings, the metaphor of the bell resonates within the humanistic blessing of the lines.
Reibetanz apprehends the casualties that may come through his adept use of hyperbole: the inanimate “pearly-lucent grapes about to burst from a tipped bowl” are a “landslide” with “bread slices in free-fall.” In a “A Changed Prospect,” emanating from Rembrandt’s self-portrait at the age of 63, a dark brush of imagery evokes grief as it leaves “worn foothpaths circling the eyes’ valleys.” All the while, reminded of the “brevity of life,” we can learn from the gnarled expert limbs of van Goyen’s oak trees about “loss and endurance.”
In a “A Changed Prospect,” emanating from Rembrandt’s self-portrait at the age of 63, a dark brush of imagery evokes grief as it leaves “worn foothpaths circling the eyes’ valleys.”
In the last stanza of Reibetanz’s sonnet on the power of a couple’s love, captured in Rembrandt’s painting, Isaac and Rebecca: “time is kept not by ticking minutes/ but by the shared single pulse that visits/his hand over her heart, her hand on his.” That pairing is, for readers, rendered more memorable through Reibetanz’s epitaph.Everyday Light is a highly recommended book of poetry from a consummately skilled and vital poet, recommended for those who cherish the turn of phrase and the imaginative leap of imagery as kindred companions to the resplendent visual world of the Dutch Renaissance.
There are boundless gifts in this collection – the way Reibetanz draws our attention to the smallest details we might have overlooked in the paintings’ online representations, details that invite us to interact with the art: the “flame-shaped single soundhole…on the bass viol”;” the lustful rabbit on the ground”; the distant windmill and the village spire.”
John Reibetanz has given poetry readings and workshops all across Canada and has published 18 collections of poetry. He has also written essays on Elizabethan drama and on modern and contemporary poetry, as well as a book on King Lear and translations of modern German poetry. A member of the League of Canadian Poets, he has been shortlisted for the national ReLit Poetry Award and won First Prize in the international Petra Kenney Poetry Competition. His poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry (Chicago), The Paris Review, and The Malahat Review, and he has also been a winner in the national poetry competitions conducted by The Fiddlehead and Vallum. He teaches English and creative writing at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he received the first Victoria University Teaching Award.
Publisher: Aeolus House (January 8, 2025)
Paperback 80 pages
ISBN: 9781987822729
A retired associate English professor in the SUNY system now residing in her hometown, Toronto, Carol Lipszyc has published three books of poetry: a chapbook, In the Absence of Sons; an eighty-poem anthology on the heart which she edited and contributed to, The Heart is Improvisational; and her collection of lyrical poems, Singing Me Home. Carol’s book of short stories, The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories, features children and adolescents across an arc of historical experience in the Holocaust. Her chapbook, Armorless, was released by Kelsay Books, in December 2025.
