THE POETS IN THIS FOLIO sing of lost and thorny love, of erotic and spiritual longing, and of the unbearable distances between desire and its object. Like the Sufi poets, these writers know that eros often lies in the improbability of union with the beloved. Like Sappho and Shakespeare, they also know that being in love is one of the poet’s natural conditions.
Lovesickness sharpens the senses, attunes them to the odd gleam of the world. It is what causes the Medieval Chinese poet Li Qingzhao to notice the “jade pillow and gauze tent” at a festival, and the speaker in Marilyn Hacker’s epistolary sonnet to vividly remember a lover from youth, with her “black jacket” and “blonde hair a little wild.” Both Shangyang Fang and Sandra Simonds offer aubades: farewell-poems exchanged between lovers at dawn, when the morning sky resembles the “belly of a fish,” as Fang writes. Likewise, Ricardo Jaramillo’s brief lyric “Epilogue” shows that even a passing moment between lovers might “contain an insinuation of the world.”
Other poems focus on love’s failures: its inability, despite our greatest hopes, to miraculously alter the circumstances of our lives. Derrick Austin’s “Consulting an Astrologer in My 34th Year Without Love” is a kind of anti-sonnet about fearing one’s own incapacity for romance; Margaret Ross’s poem “Spring” grieves a relationship that coincides with the beginning of a father’s sickness, when the lover represents “only the feeling / of escaping my life.” Still other poems, like those by Carl Phillips and Li-Young Lee, move beyond the individual beloved entirely, transmuting their longings into philosophical questions about the human soul.
Whether oneiric or ironic, confessional or metaphysical, each of these poems illustrates how love can shape us into tenderer and more attentive versions of ourselves. Reading this folio, I hope you will feel, in the words of Phillips, as if you are “traveling inside someone else’s / unspoken prayer.”
— ARIA ABER, Contributing Editor
