Drawing its title from William Blake’s hymn of praise to sexual love (Visions of the Daughters of Albion), this little book inscribes the word love in 22 of its 33 poems. They celebrate delights of being in a body. But not just sex-love of God, of friends, parents, children, pets, poems, even food, all are savored. I am struck, as well, by this poet’s range of thought, feeling, and allusion: Li Po to Garcia Lorca, May Swenson, Mary Oliver and Richard Dawkins, to Blake, the Bible, and Shakespeare (in the delightful ballad If Will Hath a Will, Anne Hathaway ). Most of all, I am haunted by the opening piece, words of love aborted mid-sentence by death. Helms has a way of making complex ideas accessible. His poems enhance and deepen our intellectual as well as sensual pleasures. Read them slowly ( mouth these verses, mumble them, suck their juice, he suggests); they will enrich you.
-Joanna Dales
Fifty years ago, John Stallworthy compiled The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, offering categories such as Persuasions and Celebrations, but also Aberrations and Desolations, reminding us that love, like the rest of life, is difficult and confusing. Here, Helms offers his own arguments, lusty, comical, often intrinsically problematic, expressions of the conflicted gaggle of beings who are human, mammals, both confined and freed by the need to stay alive and (pro)creative-all with a sense of joyous wonder.
-Richard Fenton Sederstrom, author of Sorgmantel and Icarus Rising
To the question, What’s the point of love poems, McCraw Helms responds, Why sing, when you can simply talk? Poems, he declares, conceive what would have stayed unborn, being our language making love. This poet casts an expansive net, depicting many aspects of love: sorrow-filled longing, inter-species bonding, sexual pleasure (including masturbation), conjugal love, Christ’s love, even abortion as a pained gift of love to the too-deeply damaged unborn. Note that the cover image here, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve,
by William Blake, richly enacts some of the complexities of love: Lust, envy, and regret encountering the overwhelming beauty and innocence of naked, loving delight.
-Mary Messick
