I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings by Elizabeth Spires (FSG/Foster, $17.95, 9780374335281/0374335281, 64 pp., ages 10-up, February 2009)
A photograph of a simple stone pulpit surrounded by hedges and leaves nicely sets up the theme of this collection of poems and black-and-white photographs about Nashville sculptor William Edmondson's (1874-1951) works: the idea of God speaking to and through the sculptor. This is not a religious book but rather celebrates Edmondson's quiet proclamations of divine inspiration. Spires, who seamlessly toggled between the poems of Emily Dickinson and those of a resident mouse in The Mouse of Amherst, here weaves together Edmondson's own words (taken from interviews) into a quartet of poems; Spires also contributes 19 of her own. His poems open a window into his process ("I had a vision./ I was just a boy, about thirteen, fourteen years old, doing in the cornfields./ I saw in the east world./ I saw in the west world./ I saw the flood/ . . . / God, He just showed me how"), hers provide a meditation on the piece itself, often assuming the voice of the sculpture.
For "Mermaid," a horizontal sculpture in which the figure's head and shoulders seem to spring spontaneously from within the fish itself, she writes: "Some hearts are light as a feather,/ and some are heavy as stone/ If you think my heart is heavy,/ you'd be wrong, you'd be wrong." This poem perhaps more than any other, takes up the theme (that purportedly dates back to Michelangelo) of the sculpture being released from the stone by the sculptor 's chisel. The mermaid continues: "Words are a funny thing:/ inside each impossibility/ is possibility. And inside stone/ you may find one like me." In these two lines, the poet suggests how the artist achieves the impossible, and how each sculpture, though released from the same limestone, is unique. Other poems play with the idea of art's permanence ("I want to be who I am now / forever, and I will. I will!/ Will Edmondson made sure of that," says the sculpture entitled "Girl Thinking"). Still others inject some humor at Edmondson's bending of the facts (for the sculpture "Jack Johnson," the first black heavyweight boxing champion, the poem says, "I have a question for you, Will Edmondson./ Why did you give me all this hair/ when you know that I was bald?"). A brief closing biography offers details about Edmondson's late-blooming vocation (he did his first carving at age 57; he created 300 sculptures in the 17-year period he carved, from 1931 to 1948), and how one of his patrons brought his work to the attention of Louise Dahl-Wolfe, photographer for Harper's Bazaar, who spread word of his artistry far and wide. As an African-American in a still segregated U.S., Edmondson was buried in Nashville's oldest black cemetery, Mt. Ararat. Ironically, the man who carved so many tombstones, lies without one, and no one knows precisely where his body lies. His sculptures, however, serve as an enduring epitaph.--Jennifer M. Brown