The Roses

THE ROSES, a series of poems by Rainier Maria Rilke, is a gift of solace at its heart offered in a new book by poet, N. M. Hoffman, and painter, Gloria Matuszewski. The book is comprised of Rilke's original French series, LES ROSES, published after his death, in a new English translation, with the atmospheric visual images of California artist, Gloria Matuszewski, that so forcefully heighten the beauty of the text.

The body of the book itself further distinguishes it as an appropriate tribute gift when flowers are simply not enough. THE ROSES is a hardbound volume in red with the artist's painting "Now and Forever" comprising the cover motif and it is slipcased in red with golden lettering. This is a museum-quality work and was designed by Paris designer, Élie Colistro, and printed in France.

The many French poems of famed German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke have been underserved both in French and in translation. This new book, THE ROSES, endeavors to address that for these 27 of the poet's poems originally written in French, master works of his later life.

In an age requiring so much of it, solace is the main force of these poems. It is a kind of solace that replicates the solace enforced by time, but by means of a cinematographic intimacy with the life of the Rose that startles us from our instant grief.

The Rose is, after all, close to us at every turn, in every season. The poet takes us by the hand into his garden and there we are mesmerized by the personal life of the Rose, its extraordinary elegance, reticence, exoticism. In contemplating the Being of the Rose, the reader endures a grief subsumed into a process that is primordial, even shamanistic, but which is always the provenance of the poet. ​

It is also the provenance of the visual artist who is able to render this intimacy in psychological terms for the mind to grasp through the eyes. In the images supplied for this book by the painter, Gloria Matuszewski, the eerie singularity of the Rose is vivified, a melding of what is spiritual, gestural, and contextual. In Matuszewski's work, the figure of the Rose lives tangentially with everyday life.

In this complicity, the images embrace the complexities of Rilke's formidable roses and give them a solidity that, with the text, provides a grounding for the exorcism of grief. These images have provided the way forward in understanding the poems and, without them, THE ROSES -- a tribute and a memorial to those unique individuals we have lost -- would never have come into being.