An old-fashioned book of poetry: poetry as it used to be with subject, sense and artistry. Here are thirty-five poems on love in its various aspects and manifestations. Some are simple and faux-naif, little more than nursery rhymes. Others are more demanding and extended. Many of the poems follow strict and/or complex rhyme schemes, and all are metrical. Indeed this short collection demonstrates what Modernism denies, that traditional poetry may create pieces of memorable beauty while not shunning contemporary issues and themes.
A wide range of attitudes struck are struck, but follow an alternating male-female viewpoint through the collection. There is also a progression from simple happiness, through the complex affections that make human society, to loss, regret and recollection.
A free ebook in pdf format.
Soft, fervent as teardrops, are the flowered
anemones of your breasts, but they cannot
forestall for an instant the tendernesses
with which you, O my love, will always attend me,
stepping as you must do in and out of clothes.
What have I to do with the busy movement
of limbs, the knit of patella, the sternum and always
the fragrant envelope of the body breathing,
O my love, lazily as afternoon over the eyelids
on rivers that tremulously empty south?
What is the dressing then but the long day's folding
up of the body into its shining length?
Yet I, O my love, who cannot go with you, but
endlessly vacillate, being ever running
to door, lift and car, thinking before and after
of the light which makes those webbing intrusions,
that deepening of fold into eyelid and jawbone,
as fields of armies dissolving, that, O my love,
you are moulting your body to shadow, for all
that I hold and entrance you till morning come.
