Martin Gray’s The Man Who Best Drew Women is a long poem in the epic heroic narrative style, a continuation of the poet’s themes developed in previous work such as Blues for Bird and The Death of Villeneuve. Modigliani is the representative figure of modern art, the artist as tragic hero. The poem is a reflection on aspects of the heroic, both personal and public, secular and divine, a theme in poetry as ancient as Homer and Beowulf, and as modern as televison. The narrative poem is an accurate and vivid portrayal of one of the most interesting and extraordinary artists of the twentieth century. Modigliani’s art both responded to and broke with tradition, ushering in the modern era. The Man Who Best Drew Women is a lyric biography, exact and with universal truth presenting the life of the artist in accessible and clear poetical statement, making it an essential volume for the general reader and for the student of art alike.

Martin Gray is the author of the internationally acclaimed Blues for Bird, an epic biographical poem on the life of jazz great Charlie Parker. He is also published Jackson Pollock: Memories Arrested in Space, a long poem on the turbulent life of the great Abstract Expressionist painter. Gray is recognized as one of the world’s foremost scholars of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry and is the editor of the Penguin Classic annotated edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Gray has published poems on Charlie Parker, Gilles Villeneuve, Amedeo Modigliani, Osip Mandelstam, and Caesar Vallejo, and has taught at several major universities across Canada. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia.