All posts by Eric Robert Nolan

Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations. Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.

“Flowers in a Vase,” Rachel Ruysch, circa 1700

Oil on canvas.

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where ..”

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

— from Pablo Neruda’s “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII”



“A Panoramic Landscape with a Country Estate,” Philips Koninck, circa 1649

Oil on canvas.

Illustration of Passer Domesticus, by Verónica Claudio Villasante, 2015

Verónica Claudio Villasante, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Thanks to the heart by which we live …”

Thanks to the heart by which we live,
Thanks to the tenderness,
its joys, its fears:
To me, the meanest flower that blows can give
thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

— from William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1807



Woodcut illustration for George Meredith’s “The Crown of Love,” by John Everett Millais, Joseph Swain, 1859

French Poster for “12 Monkeys” (1995)

Universal Pictures.