Anthologia VII

Joseph Bucklow’s paintings resonate closely with Robert Frost’s poem Spring Pools, particularly in their shared attention to moments of quiet transition and fragile impermanence. In Frost’s poem, the still, reflective pools of early spring hold a temporary beauty, poised on the brink of disappearance as the forest’s growth inevitably reclaims them. This sense of something fleeting—seen just before it is altered or lost—echoes through Bucklow’s brooding, semi-imagined landscapes.

Like Frost’s pools, Bucklow’s scenes exist in a state of suspension. They are neither fully present nor fully remembered, hovering between nostalgia and immediacy, theatre and reality. Frost urges us to “let them be,” to resist the human impulse to intervene or explain, and Bucklow’s work similarly invites a slower, more contemplative gaze. His paintings provide just enough detail to orient the viewer, while leaving space for uncertainty, projection, and quiet unease.

Both artist and poet elevate the overlooked and the transient. Frost finds profundity in a modest, easily missed feature of the landscape; Bucklow encourages us to dwell on forgotten or mundane spaces, where solitude and introspection emerge naturally. The expressive brushwork and deliberate inaccuracies of Bucklow’s paintings mirror the way memory distorts and enhances experience, much as Frost’s poem transforms a simple natural observation into a meditation on time, loss, and restraint.

In this way, Bucklow’s painted worlds and Frost’s Spring Pools meet in their shared sensitivity to liminal spaces; places where the mind can pause, echo, and reflect before the moment quietly passes.

Spring Pools by Robert Frost

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods---
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.