As Fingers Seek the Harp [resubmit]

The picture’s still too generic, and the contrast with the overly saturated salmon coloring of all the dead space is making the picture that much more difficult to notice in both the thumbnail and full size. While I can appreciate the picture’s naturalistic Ansel Adams kind of approach, it remains that in any era using any kind of photography, a tree is just a tree. As I recall from your previous submission, you said that these poems covered a wide range of topics, with about half being on nature in some way; so all right, I can see why you might want to show some kind of plants, but the trouble with showing only plants is that they never change from era to era.

Again, why not give us some kind of slice-of-life picture of somebody’s agrarian lifestyle from that era? While human nature doesn’t change from era to era, people’s aesthetics and fashions and lifestyles certainly do: a clear and simple shot of a farmer in the field with a horse-drawn cart or plow would speak volumes about the time and place even before people saw the dates in the subtitle; there wasn’t a lot of modern machinery in the fields back then. Also, as with rural dwellers in our times, farmers of the Great Depression era lived a lot closer to the bone and understood nature’s ways in general far better than the sophisticated urban-dwelling types who preferred to rhapsodize about and romanticize nature from a safe distance.

As for the dead space, keep in mind that there’s a reason why we call it dead space, and that “dead” was a a popular slang term for “boring” among beatniks and the like. If you want to have both an old-fashioned gray-scale photo and some color on your cover, why not try filling the cover with the photograph and then overlaying the color on the less interesting parts of it? Since the eye is naturally drawn to anything isolated, leaving a window of pure gray-scale in an otherwise pseudo-colorized image would ironically draw a prospective reader’s eye away from the color and toward the gray.

Whatever you do, however, any color you have on the cover shouldn’t be so deeply saturated as the salmon is here. Remember, sepia tones on aging photographs are subtle hints at how long ago they were taken. Retina-thrashing saturated colors will only betray the colorization’s artificiality; you’d do better to go with a mild off-yellowish-brownish tone than with the bright salmon-pink coloring you’ve got now.

That’s not a great tree photo. The angle is skewed, there’s a branch in the way, the crown is barely in the picture, and it’s awkwardly cropped. If you want to use a tree as your image, fine, but get a picture that very iconically says “tree”.

And you’re just not making use of the layout. The photo is just squished alongside the rest of the cover; it’s not a focal point, and nothing about the photo harmonizes with the rest of the layout. A drawing of a tree or a small bordered photo in the center would fit the layout better. Either way, color-match it to the rest of the cover.

P.S. Since even Google doesn’t know who S.L. Housh is, it’s safe to assume he’s not famous enough to be on your cover.

Wow! I didn’t check back for a few days and here are all these helpful replies. I am particularly grateful to the people who took time to make possible covers or suggest images. Give me a day to process all the comments and I will post a followup.

One item for now: the redwood tree was a deliberate choice, since my great-uncle lived in California and redwoods appear in a couple of the poems. The cover doesn’t have to be a redwood, or even a tree, but there was a reason for it.