The poet Elise Asher's life in art is extraordinary. Well known as a painter, there is no American painter who is as good a poet and no American poet who is as good a painter as Elise Asher. Night Train contains all the poetry that she wants to preserve, the truth of her life found in language, a life lived in two arts: her poetry kept until now almost in hiding, her other art—public. (The painting is seldom separated from images drawn from poetry).
Now we have Night Train. The poetry leads us through a private world, sometimes our own, to beauty discovered, to basic truth, to places arrived at, it seems at all hours, in the middle of the night. We do not know how we got there because the night has been long and Elise Asher was awake when we were sleeping. In the bottom of the night we are startled by her artistry.
