Untethered in Paradise by: Welch, Liliane
trade paper | 112 pages | ISBN:0-88887-204-6
Year Published:2002 – Borealis | Tidewater Price: $15.95
Liliane Welch’s latest book, “Untethered in Paradise”, accompanies the reader off the thoroughfare into a lyrical garden of artistic delights. Rodin, Cézanne, Chardin, Monet, Vermeer are among the artists whose life and work the author contemplates in alternating poems and prose. The book is also in part the fruit of a literary/poetic exchange between Welch and Luxembourg painter, Gust Graas. We travel with her on pilgrimage across Western Europe and back home to the Bay of Fundy, to the productions of Maritime artist, Alex Colville, whose painting, “The Surveyor”, adorns the book’s cover.
Despite the vast territory covered, at no point do Welch’s soulful explorations become an arduous whirlwind trip. She whisks us past the tourist-filled studio of abandoned tools, away from souvenir shops and busloads of visitors herded through galleries and plaque-laden routes. Instead, we flee with the poet into paintings and onto sun-baked fields, giddily frolic amidst lavender and sage, climb mountains, stroll through lily gardens, and walk cobbled streets in afternoon sunlight.
In a voice both candid and lyrical, Welch reveals an intimate bond with life and art that has animated her from youth through middle age, divulging such vivacity that one cannot escape unaffected. Her own intensely personal work of art invites us to partake in the wisdom “that gardens, paintings and poems respond, if entered and loved.” For her, art challenges us to explore the beauty and mystery of the deceptively commonplace. The artist becomes upholder of vision, though often at odds with social, political and artistic convention. “Untethered in Paradise” addresses the isolation and commitment that come with years of hard work and thought. Welch’s artists are muses, marching ahead of her, cheering her on. Welch, too, inspirits her reader, sharing passionately her own freedom of vision.