I received an arc from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest opinion.
This is a beautiful collection of classic English poems accompanied by comics in various styles. I really enjoyed the way that the poems have been brought to life with this visualization. While I am no fan of mangas and comics on classics, with poems it seems to be another thing for me. I especially love the different parts of the collection, for example seeing nature or seeing death. Also I think it was the right decision to add the original poem after the comic strips, as sometimes the text was a bit hard to read on the images and also this provides the awesome experience of being able to compare both ways of reading the poem - with and without the comics.
A great short read that introduced me to some poems that I did not know yet. I wished that the selection of poems would have been a bit broader though - most had quite a melancholy and negative undertone and I would have enjoyed to see some more poems which are celebrating the beautiful and positive sides of life.

This book was so cool. If you've ever struggled with understanding or immersing yourself into some of the "great" poems, Peters' comics and imagination will take your hand and bring you into them as the poems come alive. What a neat idea!

It's hard to put into words how breathtaking and splendid the illustrations are alongside classic poems, and understandably so. Not only do they add meaning and life into the works of literary icons, it's also interesting to note the artist's interpretation of such symbolic poems. The drawings also match the mood of each poem, with some boasting a vibrant blend of colours and others being dark and sombre. Highly recommended!

I loved the premise of this. The illustrations were incredible and really added a new layer to these poems. Highly recomend this one.

Interesting, unusual read, not recommended for everyone. Best hand selected based on personality. Will use possibly on occasion.

Thank you to NetGalley and Plough Publishing House for providing an eARC copy of the book for me to provide an honest review.

This is a wonderful collection of fantastic poems - and the art is absolutely wonderful as well! I wasn't sure what to expect when I chose to look over the book. Some of the poems read as comics might - with panels and text to go with them. While others are whole works of art in themselves. I could almost imagine that many artists had their hands in this book not just Julian Peters. His style for the poems varies here and there. Ink, watercolors, pencils.

It's a wonderful collection of beautiful poems that everyone should read at least once, and I feel that the illustrations only enhance the poems and make them that much more enjoyable. It's always wonderful to see artistic interpretation of classic works of literature and poetry, and this certainly doesn't disappoint at all.

If you're a fan of classic poetry and beautiful art and comics, then I can certainly suggest picking this book up.

Got this ARC on Netgalley.

Julian Peters surprises and delights the senses with his incredible renditions of old poems (many of which I had never read before and was glad I hadn’t because the experience was additionally beautiful supplemented by art). His colour palette and his stylistic range are diverse and stunning. Highly recommend for anyone who loves poetry and art/graphic novels.

Beautiful poetic work by Julian Peters. This book is ideal for lovers of verse and one I would be glad to share.

Poems to See By is a unique and beautiful collection of classic poems. I received this as an incomplete advanced digital copy so I do not know what the final form will be, but it would be a lovely book to keep on a coffee table or end table to enjoy from time to time. Many of the poems were familiar to me, but others were not. I don't read much poetry and the artwork and comic book style layout was engaging and helpful in understanding the rhythm. The artist, Julian Peters, states in the preface "The poetry comics included in this book set out to adapt or, it could be said, translate great poems into the visual language of comics." As a visual learner, I found the artwork a powerful aid to understand the poems. In particular, the artwork accompanying the poem Buffalo Dusk by Carl Sandburg is especially moving and impactful. I reccomend this collection to any poetry lover and to anyone who desires to develop a greater appreciation for poetry.
Thank you to Netgalley and Plough Publishing for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

It is a refreshing take on famous poetry.
What Julian Peters does. He gives shape to couplets of a poem in form of a soulful illustration. And he paints a whole story out of it.
He has drawn illustrated pieces of 24 famous poems.
Poems by Yeats, TS Elliot, William Wordsworth and many others.
Soul of the book is artwork.
Every poem has different style of painting. Few are watercolors, few are pencil shadings , few are like Japanese Magna and even abstract art.
All poems are soulfully depicted.
I liked art related to very long Elliot's poem the most, which is called, The love song of Alfred Frukrock.
Wonderful art and wonderful poems form a interesting combination.
If you are looking for different styles of art in single volume and read few great poems alongwith it, pick up this book. Each segment is painstakingly constructed to keep the quality of work excellent.
Thanks netgalley and publisher for review copy.

What a fascinating idea to create a graphic "novel" of classic poems! I could see how this might draw in readers who find poetry confusing or daunting or too highbrow. It was interesting to see the illustrator choose to portray the poet in a lead role for some of the poems, even though they may not be autobiographical poems. I'd love to see more of volumes like this. I also appreciated that every poem wasn't illustrated in the same manner, but the drawings seemed to be connected to topic or voice of the individual pieces.

I love how Julian Peters took 24 popular poems and by using a comic book format breathed fresh light into them, and gave the me a visual way of enjoying them. The full poem is also printed on a page following the artistic version.

The poems are grouped around themes such as family, identity, creativity, time, mortality, and nature. This is a truly original idea, and I hope that the author creates more books like this.

What a charming book. Most of the drawings, such as Maya Angelou's Why Does The Caged Bird Sing? and Poe's Annabel Lee, were more straightforward interpretations of the subject matter. Others were either startling or poignant in their juxtaposition of poem and image. Colouring and style varies from jagged black and white to soft colour (not having any artistic talent beyond stick figures, that's the best way I can describe it).

Favourites:

Before the Battle, which shows frightened soldiers preparing for war. The expressions on their faces, the glimpse of light and a shred of barbed wire - it all complements the poem perfectly.

When You Are Old by Yeats - beautiful drawings, and the anime/manga style was unexpected but vivid. It worked well with the poem's theme of lost love.

Ozymandias shows a succession of conquering nations, ending with the ISIS flag. Similarly, The World is Too Much With Us has mobile phones to represent 'the world', and Carl Sandburg's The Buffaloes has the titular animals stampeding, transparent as ghosts, across carparks.

Least Favourites:

The comic interpretation perhaps didn't suit Spring and Fall and The Force that Through the Green Fuse considering their subject matter - Dylan in particular is full of life force, and the comic style chosen seemed too soft to convey it. This is not so much a reflection on the drawings as on my own mental images of those poems, which are quite different from the artist's interpretation.

I requested this because it looked interesting. I am blown away. The poems, many I knew, some I did not, are all beautiful. But the art. Oh the art! All different styles from pen and ink, to anime to watercolor. All amazing at encompassing the feel and style of the words. The modern interpretation of Wordsworths "The World is Too Much With Us" was impactful. The use of a quilt like design for Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird" was stirring. Just wow.

In Poems To See By, comic artist Julian Peters introduces us to his visual translation of poems by such greats as Shelley and Yeats, Bishop and Angelou. The book cover introduces the artist’s purpose where a boy lifts a book toward an expansion of sea, sky, and stars beyond his personal space on a ship’s deck. In this collection, the artist renders his own response to great alphabetic texts through his rich visual language that expands and enriches each poem. Peters uses his comic art not only to pay tribute to the beauty of the selected poems but to “pull them in as close as possible.”
We are struck by the artist’s personal vision as we move from the last page of his comic art to the traditional text of each poem, thus shaking up our response to poems with which we believed ourselves comfortably familiar. This stylistic arrangement upends our expectations and expands our discoveries, for example Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” that begins with a series of variously colored squares and rectangles that form bars, surprisingly empty of birds until the later panels.
Image and word texts flow into each other to be absorbed into the reader’s experience. In “Musee des Beaux Arts,” a traditional ekphrastic poem, Auden engages Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus as a starting point for his contemplation of human suffering. In choosing Auden’s poem, Peters will turn this pattern around, as his visual panels engage the poem’s text, layering a rich juxtaposition of 16th century painting, 20th century poetry, and 21st century comic art, opening new avenues for the reader.
In this unique collection, we are invited to see poems we meet for the first time or rediscover in new ways. As we respond to this interplay of visuals and texts, we obtain a new scope, both greater and yet more intimate, as we bring our own life touchstones, memories, and symbols to discover each poem’s expanded beauty and possibilities. This is a marvelous book.
Judith M. Robinson

I didn't know what to expect with this title, but I ended up absolutely loving it. Julian Peters has taken a number of classic poems and put them to art. Each poem has a distinct art style that fits it perfectly and tells the story of it. I was a little bummed that the eARC didn't have all the artwork yet since I would have loved to see the art that went with the rest of the poems. It's also nice that each poem is printed separately after the poem with artwork so that you can absorb the poem with or without the art.

*I received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for the free comic book / poetry collection.*

"Poems to See by" is the graphic illustration of world famous poems by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and many more. We find the text embedded in the panels, it's quite beautiful. The style of the different poems is mirrored in the drawing style. Each illustrated poem is followed by the text of the poem without any drawings in order for the reader to read the poems once more without the pictures. I personally loved the choice of poems (T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson! <3) and how well the drawings fitted the poems. The pictures are, of course, a sort of interpretation of the poems, but I liked that.

5 Stars!

I never read anything like that: poetry in comic form. I think the illustrator has an interesting interpretation of the poems and this book definitely had beautiful art styles. Also, I liked that it has a good variety of themes, some were lighthearted, others dark...

I’d like it more if the poems were before the comics, so we could interpret them in our head ourselfs and then see what the artist interpreted them as.

As it is with poems, liked some more, others less, but my favorite was the one from Dante’s inferno

This Just Blew Me Away

I wasn't quite sure what I was in for when I downloaded this book. O.K., illustrated poems - I get that. Who didn't grow up with ripping action illustrations accompanying a school days classic like "...the midnight ride of Paul Revere"? I sort of expected something along those lines, and just hoped I'd like the artist's style. I was totally out of line on that.

The book opens with a brief foreword/essay about how poetry and sequential comics art complement each other. The essay felt a bit like the author was trying too hard to justify his effort, but I'm glad I read the whole essay. It got me thinking about the relationship between the poetry and the sequential art, and it turns out that there's a good bit to think about while enjoying this book. As the author/artist suggests, consider rhythm, stress, repetition, juxtaposition, contrast, and the challenges of translation and interpretation. By the end of the book I almost felt like I owed the author/artist an apology for doubting him.

I was amazed to see that for each poem Julian Peters adopted a different, distinct style and medium. Impressionistic, realistic, collage, watercolors, oils, pencils, inks - each poem is treated in a completely distinct fashion unlike anything that came before or comes after. It looks exactly as though each poem was illustrated by a different artist.

And each treatment suits, complements, and enhances the poem. So, for something like "Invictus" we get a muscular, ripping, pen and ink adventure sequence. For "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" we get just lines of colors and naif collages that suggest freedom and captivity, with the poem carefully penciled into the lines. In "Hope is the Thing With Feathers" a brightly colored bird flies through black pencil sketches of scenes of hope and despair. Hughes's "Jukebox Love Song" looks like someone sent Edward Hopper to Harlem with a box of watercolors and an order to lighten up. Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much With Us" rendered in iPhone text messages? Inspired.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. This is a playful, deadly serious, creative, marvelously accomplished book that will delight those who like their poetry with a side of Della Robbia Blue. And if you wonder how it could even be possible to present T.S. Eliot or Dylan Thomas in a comics or graphic form, well this book has those answers. A wonderful find.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Seeing great poems illustrated in this way was absolutely incredible. As a very visual person myself, it definitely added a lot to the already beloved poems.