Capricorn, Venus Descendant: 50 Poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros

Mature poetry from a master wordsmith, dealing with crises of cancer and pandemic, redeemed by the joy and comfort of physical love.

In the poem Serpentine from his new collection CAPRICORN, VENUS DESCENDANT, Michael Joyce describes himself Caught in his own cleverness, tumbling through too damn many words for what's /something everybody knows--but he's kidding, really, for surely no one is more in love with words than Joyce, or more skillful at teasing us with them. Consider his subtitle: we readily recognize eros, of course, and these days are grown too familiar with pandemos--but karkinos sends us to the dictionary, yielding an awareness of how these poems arise from confrontation with mortality, from a personal crisis wrapped in a global one. There are moments of profound despair here, of frailty and failing flesh; but they are redeemed by long-familiar and cherished intimacy, what / love is ever even under present circumstance, and that circumstance affords space for joy and mirth, sacred and profane entwining in wickedly delightful ways. These are mature poems in every sense of the word, and contain--like the dream that the she at the center of the poet's life has at one point--everything.

Poetry.
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