Dresden poet Mark Melnicove and artist Abby Shahn are longtime friends. A few years ago, Shahn began sending Mark paintings with an invitation ... to write a response. And he would.

When she began sending him images from her Ghosts series, they seemed familiar to him as he looked and listened to each one.

“I’m listening for direction,” Melnicove said. “I will hear something inside, or outside of me … Part of the process is listening to that inner ear that develops in poets.”

What started as cyber communication became a collaboration of verse and paintings blended together in the book “Ghosts.” The book, composed of 31 paintings and poems, was released in November 2018.

Melnicove, a poet of 50 years, has written pieces that connect the now with the past; life with death.

When he received the painting listed as Number 2, “Words are currents,” Melnicove said, “I saw some lines that looked like electricity and started to riff off of that.”

The painting has a background of oranges, reds, white and a darker color, green, or brown, perhaps. The two darker figures in the forefront appear to be conversing – there are zig-zaggy lines between them. A third figure is less defined, but its entire head is alive with white light. Other, more shadowy figures stand nearby, then fade into one another.

“Words are like currents that light up the dark … Huddling to catch a buzz, they jazz things up and know each other, not just intimately, but instantaneously.”

Some poems are about some of Melnicove’s family members including his mother, father and uncle.

Poem 9, “Even When She Becomes,” explores the instinctive protective nature of a mother for her young. It is a powerful poem. The Shahn painting that inspired it is equally strong …. painted in whites, grays, blacks, a ghostly mother figure stands at the forefront with two smaller specters of different heights – all three are realized in black. Other spirits beyond them are mostly white, some just a brush stroke for a body and distinct circular shape atop for a head; others are blurred, white, one appears to have tiny light or stars where a head might be … the ghosts.

“Even when she becomes a ghost, a mother may protect her children. She may watch as they draw ahead of her unafraid, smile as they pull pranks and hide keys. Behind her will float her mother and her mother’s mother never far from reach ... She nurtures lineages, without which love would not come back.”

Melnicove noted how many cultures honor – and learn from – ghosts. “They guide us to the next station. I’m trying to learn from that. I approach experiences with ghosts scientifically … DNA is ghostly; we’re all linked to the beginning of life … there’s a sequence there. “

Poem 24, “That night on the hilltop,” will resonate deeply with readers who have had an experience similar to the one this poet shares. Melnicove said he wrote this poem about what happened to him behind the Dresden barn. The poem is about the feelings of well-being and acceptance as experienced by the writer’s soul through the company of guardian ghosts or guardian spirits. But of the place? The human being? I think the latter as I interpret these ghosts to be members of the writer’s soul group. And a rare occurrence it is said to be – to be visited by your soul group while still incarnate on Earth, or wherever …

“… Sentinels of the unspoken, they did not reject me or try to mold me into their fold and nurtured me with silence. I do not know how long we stood together or who they had been when they were flesh or after they departed what clouds they became or what rain. But I was never the same again and I know wherever they are we remain one tribe, for when they move, I reply, and when I call, they answer.”

Abby Shahn created 50 paintings in her ghost series, all made in gouache she makes herself, “ … using pure pigments and a binder made with a mixture of glycerine, honey, and gum Arabic.”

Shahn studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from 1959 to 1961 and went on to New York City's Pratt Graphics Center and Art Students League.

Shahn lives in Solon after living in New York City for many years. She says she is working on several new projects; however, “I usually resist verbal descriptions of my work. I also don’t ever know which of my projects will bear fruit and which will turn out to be duds.”

No doubt Melnicove will be one of the first to know which is which.

He has a reading coming up in Cape Elizabeth at Busy Bee Cafe on March 23 from 4 to 5 p.m. Come June he’ll be at the Harlow Gallery in Hallowell. More readings are in the works.

See more of the Ghosts series at www.abbyshahn.com. For more on Melnicove, visit https://markmelnicove.com.

“Ghosts” is available for purchase through Amazon and can be requested through bookstores ... like Sherman’s here in Boothbay Harbor and Damariscotta.