You Are My Joy and Pain: Love Poems

You Are My Joy and Pain is Naomi Long Madgett’s latest and possibly most endearing poetry collection. Bill Harris, a 2011 Kresge Foundation Eminent Artist, said of the book, Even with the evidence of over a half-century or more of first-rate poetic artistry by Madgett, this collection is a breath-arresting surprise and delight. Poem-by-poem and section-by-section amaze. Each poem in the collection is a master class in technique and in her ability to transpose an idea into a tightly composed example of the craft of poetry .

You Are My Joy and Pain receives its name from the Billie Holiday song Don’t Explain and is divided into three parts. The first part, A Promise of Sun , contains fourteen poems relating to the hopeful and joyful beginning of a new relationship. The second part, Trinity: A Dream Sequence , consists of twenty poems with religious imagery and encompasses both the beginning and the end of a relationship. The third part, Stormy Weather , includes thirty-two poems that relate to the heartbreaking experience of a love gone wrong.

These are not love poems in the abstract-the richness with which Madgett writes hints at the firsthand experience of a lifetime of loving. While several anthologies of love poems exist in the world, it is rare to find a single-author collection that so closely examines love in all of its messy and beautiful layers. Readers will identify with the hope and disappointment that Madgett presents in these poems.