What Patricia Young found in Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was the wellspring for “The Art of Love,” a remarkable series of poems, each illuminated by an epigraph from Ellis’s writings. His “Most children … are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies” results in her “What We Know About Babies,” which proposes sources from “cow patties” to “dug out of/ the ground along with the potatoes.” In her acknowledgments, Young indicates that “images or phrases drawn from Ellis’s work are occasionally woven into the poems themselves.” The voice is at times a persona (“Moments After My Conception,” “Taboo-Girl,” “Devil Lover”) and at times documentary narrator, presenting themes through various examples. In “A Question of Frequency,” a Hindu physician, the Talmud, Russian priests, a ninth-century monk, and the Archbishop of Canterbury indicate “how often sexual intercourse should take place.”
These intriguing details lead the reader to wonder which are based on Ellis, which on Young’s further research, and which on her imagination. That quibble aside, Young’s attention to diction and form is masterful. In “Portal” the words for navel convey the joy of the poem’s composition: “a glub-nut, pin-/ prick, glob-nob, dung-bun,/ squirt-drop, a whisper soft as …” Similarly, “Night-Running,” about “trial-marriages,” presents “Tarrying,” “handfasting, bundling” and “quested.” As to form, among free verse, couplets, triplets, sextets, Q and A and prose poems, I was particularly drawn to “The Cult of the Bath,” a pantoum bookended by “My love is Tahitian, clean, clean” and “My Tahitian lover, however, is clean, clean.”
“The Art of Love” is followed by “Karita in Love (again)” and “God’s Last Words.” “Karita” uses different voices to muse about her topic. In “Boys,” Young provides the details through which we can often recognize our adolescent selves—”we were doomed/ before we began, hard-wired to want/ even the loudmouth punks/ setting off firecrackers at dawn.” In “Sex: Reasons for Having It,” Young’s list includes such chestnuts as “I felt sorry for him” and “I was flattered” and that wonderfully banal “It was one of those days, a Tuesday, I think.” Most thought-provoking is the parthenogenesis imagined in “Endgame,” where men (“you”) are extinct, and “Every myth bleeds into a memory of you.”
The book’s final section is the sequence “On Sex and Wooden Boats: God’s Last Words.” Faithful to its title, for all the double entendres, the diction and prosody recall the English of the King James Bible: “And fear not, for I shall not smite you for bedding/ down one with the other or for entering into communion// with the one whom you adore. Behold, for I, even I,/ am the breath of the wind that carries your dory up// the Inside Passage and through the misty fjords.”
Poems from An Auto-Erotic History of Swings have appeared in some 15 literary magazines and anthologies, and have been short-listed for nine poetry awards, winning Arc‘s Poem of the Year Contest and Grain‘s prose poem competition. Young’s book as a whole, too, will surely be recognized.
Maxianne Berger is the author of Dismantled Secrets. She has work forthcoming in Brèves littéraires.
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nice review Maxianne, I will look for this book. Although the title is a mystery….