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Carol DeVaughn biography
last update:
14th Sep19
e-mail Carol
listen: Carol DeVaughn at Poetic Voices
poetry favourites:
The National Gallery
The British Museum
Tate Modern
Tate Britain
and in the shop…
collection –
“Life Class”
Oversteps Books
After reading English and Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Carol had an apprenticeship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she studied museum practice, which included giving some tours on nineteenth century French painting and doing independent research on the relationship between Buddhist thought and Western art forms.
In 1970 she moved to London where she has lived and worked ever since, practising T’ai Chi as a dance/art form, a meditation, and a martial art; researching in the British Museum Reading Room and the V&A Library; doing life modelling for three years and, along the way, teaching English language and literature.
Since 2004 she has won prizes for her poetry, including a Bridport in 2012, and was long-listed in the National Poetry Competition 2011. She has been reciting poetry for charity since 1995. Her first poetry collection is Life Class, published by Oversteps Books in November 2018.
Comments:
[on Life Class] … I loved the attitude of the life-class model – and many of the ekphrastic poems are masters of their genre.
Kay Syrad
… a remarkably assured first collection … an unusually attentive eye is married to considerable linguistic accuracy and grace. This is a collection that deserves to be widely read.
Carole Satyamurti
An enjoyable book, especially the life class poems. Wonderfully original.
Martyn Crucefix
Carol DeVaughn’s poetry has an intimate, almost prayerful quality whose effect is both to still and to invigorate the reader’s mind.
Rather than describing the visible world, DeVaughn deploys visual images to evoke precise feelings and atmospheres: the final sequence of poems is written from the point of view of a life-class model, from which DeVaughn makes an exacting spiritual discipline, compellingly original in expression as well as in perception.
Lesley Saunders
The ekphrastic poems gain depth from the personal experience of being the subject of art … this makes for an intriguing and thought-provoking examination of the art of looking.
D.A. Prince, London Grip, February 2019. Read Review
Michelangelo sculptures and van Gogh paintings become living tableaux; space, time and even the human body appear mutable and things are not as they seem … Over time her focus moves beyond the detail of her surroundings into a kind of reverie or meditation … An intriguing first collection.
Robin Houghton, The Frogmore Papers, Number 93
The title of Carol DeVaughn’s first collection, Life Class, embraces the range of the collection perfectly as these poems are studies in the art of observation of both the external world and the subtle shifts of thought and feeling experienced by the poet.
Anna Avebury, Ver Poets Poetry World, Summer 2019