Title: Surrealist Love Poems Author: Edited By Mary Ann Caws Publisher: Tate Publish Date: 2001 Pages: 120 Genres:: Poetry, Compilation Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

Surrealist Love Poems opens with a lingering foreword on the origins of surrealist poetry and its depiction of how the power of sexual and romantic passion eclipse reason and logic in both life and writing. The collection features the works of surrealist founding father Andre Breton, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dali, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Joyce Mansour, Paul Eluard, Rene Char and more.

I found this anthology of verse is a solid but at times stilted and arduous read. Most of the poems are written in an erotic stream of consciousness style, in which female genitalia are compared to flowers. “My love/her sex gladiolus” is a line from Andre Breton’s “Free Union.” The narrator of one poem wishes for her lover to intensely suffer the agony of her intoxicating memory once she's gone “Even Long After My Death” (Alice Paalen). Picasso appears as author in “Her Great Thighs,” and Dali extols the virtues of his beloved wife Gala in “Binding cradled-cradle bound.” Mystical, transporting, otherworldly work from the best of the best, but I still found myself wanting to find a phrase like Sylvia Plath’s lusty description of the “sticky white filth of desire,” but then it would be hard to not perceive that description as anything but staunchly realist.

Varying themes run throughout this anthology, as do many body fluids (at least, their description). The movement of a lover’s body reveals worlds within worlds. Erotic Atlantis is discovered every second, it seems. Plentiful parallels are also drawn between the structures of the earth and the structure of lovers’ physiques. The intimacy of the details did travel the authors past death and through time for me and made them real-time friend accessible, but I have to say, after 10 or so really exceptional poems, boring friends. It makes me think of the naughty lyric from Peter Gabriel’s song "Sledgehammer": “Show me round your fruit cakes/ for I will be your honey bee” except the surrealists phrased it more like “I the honey bee delicately tether the pulp of your fruitcakes with the ephemerally thin cords of the air you breathe. Wet and tied.” The euphemisms make the sex that much more obscene and make me yearn for the comfort of a more cuddly and accessible layman’s title like "Wet Asses, Broken Glasses."

Nonetheless, the book deserves credit for its outline of history and showing it made flesh. Surrealist Love Poems is for the mind’s mouth to eat slowly and divide into separate meals.