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Letters to Michelangelo from Wyoming is a collection of epistolary or letter poems to the Masters of the Italian Renaissance: Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Leonardo DaVinci and others. These letter poems were inspired from the poet Burt Bradley's journey to Italy with the celebrated Wyoming painter John Giarrizzo. They collaborated on drawings and poems as they visited Rome, Florence, and Milan. Not as tourists, but to see Italy through the eyes of their respective art. Their visit was a pilgrimage, particularly to "meet" the Old Masters "up close and personal" through their paintings and sculpture.
Returning to Wyoming, Bradley found himself not ready to sever the rich connection with the Masters and began to see Wyoming's beauty through their eyes. The poet drew inspiration from the letter poems of Richard Hugo, David Citino, and Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin, as well as Mark Twain's Diaries of Adam and Eve and Letters from the Earth.
Accompanying the poetic letters are Bradley's Italian poems that, along with Giarrizzo's drawings, reflect upon the masterpieces of sculpture and painting: Michelangelo's David, Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, and Caravaggio's The Calling of St. Mathew, among others. The rich descriptions of these poems complement the "Letters" that narrate Bradley's own art of living in the rough-hewn beauty and weather-challenged landscape of Wyoming.
About the author
Burt Bradley lives on a bluff in Northwest Wyoming seventy miles from Yellowstone National Park. For over thirty years, with his wife Janet, a photographer, he has delved into the wild serenity of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. His writing has appeared in Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region, Michigan Quarterly Review, Best of Writers at Work, among others. He is currently professor emeritus at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, where he taught Writing in the Wild classes in Yellowstone and the Southwest Desert.
