George Garrett (poet)

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George Garrett (born 1929) is an American poet and novelist. He has been the poet laureate of Virginia since 2002. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He has worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Hollins University and, for many years, the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard and Irving Malin.

Among his poems, 'Virtuosity', inspired by Bernini's Apollo and Daphne:

I see the girl become a tree,/ fear printed cleanly on her face,/ lips tense with a frozen scream.

From her toes roots reach for earth. / Leaves from her fingers flutter free / to test a breeze which is her clothing.

She is made of marble much like flesh, / veined in blue and polished to a point / where mortal hands are sorely tempted.

Bernini, virtuoso, tortured her / into this being and, as well, / the slim, lightfooted god a step behind.

I think: What virtue is in this? / Marble is not flesh and blood. / I love the grain of naked lumber.

But here she is, in fact, who first/ was wholly stone and now seems flesh/ and in one shudder will be wood.

Even the god must be baffled/ by richness of change and becoming,/ by the anguish of answered prayer.

My prayers stop in my throat./ I dream of our lost beginnings./ I huddle in poor skin and bones.

Think of Bernini, then. Praise him./ His joyous hands were simply free./ Here prayers are songs from Eden.