“To read Farnham Blair's poems is to feel the careful throb of the particular, of the complex work that goes into apprehending a moment or a painting or a photograph. Blair is an unrepentant and clear-eyed art lover. His feeling for the compositional and textural genius of the likes of Degas, Walker Evans, and Renoir is downright inspiring. He is a good deal more, however, than an evoker of nuanced details. Each poem has a shape and a direction and each conclusion rings steadily and sometimes painfully true. Nothing -- least of all, art -- comes without a price, and it is Blair's gift to focus so sensitively on the pleasures and hazards of aesthetic responsibility.”

— Baron Wormser

“With Proust perched on one shoulder and Cheever on the other, Farnham Blair seduces a reader by deft strokes in his memoir of post World War II in Washington. His literary sketches — portraits, snapshots and cartoons — all accumulate to become an unforgettable evocation of a time and place gone by as well as a boy becoming a man.”

— Peter Davis

“I really loved Peripheral Visions. It's a delicate and deceptively simple way to paint the significant portraits in your life. And I love the way the perceptions change from a child's vision to a young man's to an adult. It gives resonance to a memoir or journal that I haven't seen before. And, incidentally, it paints a profound portrait of you.”

— Anne Rivers Siddons

What a pleasure to read and to reread Farnham Blair's new collection of poems, The Movie Queen! His voice is sure, trustworthy, and generous, yet full of layered irony, ambiguity, and wit, and keeps suggesting more meaning and mystery. From Leonardo to Degas to Mapplethorpe, he explores the diversity of intent that results in art, discovering in photographs and paintings those clues which imply the personalities of the artists as well as the elusive ramifications of their art. Mostly, though, in the lovely, unpretentious cadences of these poems, we find an insightful acceptance for the fullness of our humanity.

— Robert Shetterly

“Farnham Blair's poetic brightness counts on our ability to imagine. We can come to these poems from our experience or intelligence.”

— Leo Connellan

“It’s a pleasure to encounter a writer who takes on such diverse topics as the wall-television and the late de Koonings. Blair’s deeply felt and considered observations on high and low art offer something for everyone.

In ‘Sheep’, an insightful and humorous musing on Acoustiguides, Blair describes the headsets that inform and herd the museum visitor around from painting to painting ‘...they all march past the artworks at a pace set by the machine. They will trample you!’ Woe to the person looking for a quiet, prolonged meditation in front of a work of art. These Art Notes will give the reader that time.”

— MaJo Keleshian

“Farnham Blair is one of those rare birds, a philosopher critic a la Roland Barthes, practicing a poetics of seeing. Be it de Kooning, Derain, Degas or Disney, Blair brings fresh insights to all manner of art — even postcards and television. He often scorns the dogmas; and his thought process is relievedly first person, with a soupçon of edgy humor. Discussion of aesthetics leads to landscape, sprawl, the mythology of water, patina and resonance - even legal issues (child photography, the cultural imprisonment of women artists). And Blair is always looking beyond the current zeitgeist, imaging the future with clear head, eyes and pen. ‘Pleasure of the text’ indeed!”

— Carl Little