AFTER LOVE ~ Poems

The Esthetic Apostle has just reprinted After Love in a corrected, revised edition. This edition comprises my final emendations, and is now registered with an ISBN and available on Amazon.com. I would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Muiris Griffin, for his tasteful work on the book, as well as Benjamin Erlandson [benerlandson.net] for kind permission to use an image from his series, 'Escarpment Fog':

After Love is a short collection of wistful poems, 16 in all, that treat of love, loss, war, regeneration, conflagration, aging, illness, and the exotic. One senses slight, nuanced transgressions in some of these poems, especially in 'Nereids', 'The Disappearing Art', 'The Wasps', and 'Oulipo', where the exotic grows out of the macabre and sometimes even out of brutality. An allusion to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in 'The Disappearing Art' finds its poetic correlative or analogue in 'Oulipo', while the miscarriage in 'Midwife' is recalibrated in 'Our Lost Son'. Curiously, even ephemerally, the poems converse with one another so that the theme of bugonia in 'The Wasps' finds an alternate treatment in 'Wildfire' and 'Ephemeris'. The title of the book, After Love, can suggest either a life after love or a yearning after love, and both senses are subsumed in the eponymous poem. The long poem 'Tunnels' expands on many of these themes and explores the larger one of aging, ailing, and the grief of departing our teeming earth. The old man in section III sees his world reflected upside-down and in reverse in the bauble-like apples hanging from the trees, and he tries to find answers to his own condition in their cycles, symmetries, and ultimate decay. After Love is a small book but its themes are large and highly provocative, and it captures in beautiful lyrics the extraordinary majesty and mystery of nature, life, and the human condition.