I bought this book last weekend, and when I finished The Physics of Love, I wasn’t ready to jump back into the Keats, so I read this book instead.
The book is subtitled “Ecstatic Verse” and is called “devotional verse” on the back cover, but I thought most of it would be meditative in nature given the “paper rhythm” of a couple syllables per line which lends itself more to the contemplative pacing of haiku more than ecstasy, which I would associate with longer lines. Some of the poems are rather short, too, with a title and a couple of words for contemplation.
But the poems do get a little more ecstatic, with several sexual-themed pieces. Is the sexual experience leading to an experience of the divine, or is the poet-narrator’s experience of the divine akin to sexual experience? The poems leave room for interpretation and, dare I say it, meditation on the point.
At any rate, some good moments, but I am still not a fan of the paper rhythm and prefer the more lyrical spoken rhythm in poetry.
I’ve got a couple of other books by this author, as I mentioned, which are not poetry which I’ll probably delve into before too long, where “too long” might mean “within a decade” as my unread collection of books still numbers in the thousands.
