After finishing Houses of Worship, I wanted another book to serve its purpose: Something a little light to read or browse not during football games (probably not going to watch many again this year) but in the fifteen or so minutes between finishing a chapter in a longer work and actually going to bed. I didn’t find a similar coffeetable book immediately, but I did pick up this book which I bought in April 2022, and, as it happens, I read the whole thing in one sitting.
Not because it was compelling nor particularly good poetry.
Instead, it’s a litany of poems written about specific lovers and wives whom he cheated on with named and poetized lovers (and the wives, apparently, cheated on him as well). But it’s written as a bit of a retrospective, a lyin’ in the winter of his years, trying to recapture a bit of his youth and/or maybe brag.
Although published in 1984, this book is a bit of a throwback; the author’s first (of only a handful) collection appeared in 1957, and he went into teaching in the 1960s. So he was in academia in the free love era, when poets were sexy, and he took advantage of it. Yet I can’t but characterize him as Rod McKuen without the depth.
How did this signed copy come to Missouri from back east where the author taught? Apparently, he was a Springfield native (although he did not live here for most of his life). So it’s not like finding Bernard O’Donoghue’s copy of Five Themes of Today here.
