This is a rare look inside the art world and art making by an internationally recognized sculptor. Murray Dewart has built large public sculptures around the world over the course of 50 years. He is also a fine writer. Poignant, literate, spiritual, and poetic, this memoir narrates the inside dramas and politics of the art world, the galleries, collectors, and public commissions. Dewart shares his experience of the triumphs and the heartbreak. Compiled from his daily journals, the narrative is spirited and infectious, sharp with revealing details and humor, full of personal musings and colorful, sometimes bawdy anecdotes. There is a soulful dimension to this story, as Dewart asks the big questions about life and purpose. He is both an artist and a family man, weaving together the personal and the professional with an authentic voice from inside the discipline of art.

Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats's Grecian urn and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' to contemporary verse about Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman's windborne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts - clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze - into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers.