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Title: The Sorrows of Eros and Other Poems by Henry Weinfield ISBN: 0-268-01766-2 Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr Pub. Date: December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: 'The Sorrows of Eros': A Demanding, Good Companion
Comment: "They clipped your wings? Well now you're doing time/ For every verse, for every bloody rhyme."

In a blurb on the back cover of this 1999 collection, noted poet-translator Allen Mandelbaum calls Weinfield's verses "companions to be treasured." To read this book is to put yourself in the company of Hamlet and all others imprisoned by love, brutal worldly intrigue -- and their own mortality. You could choose worse companions.

If you are moved by Yeats and Auden more than the Beats or Lifshin, or simply seek, with Weinfield's Eros,

...sources of the ancient spring,/ the luminous and liquid solacings/ that language proffers us against the void

you might love to undertake "The Sorrows of Eros" - though the poems are anything but simple. Weinfield's Muse is one of lyrical beauty; his mode encompasses classical techniques and the clarity of philosophical argument; yet he carries the burdens of History and contemporary irony. About which, in his own wry way, he will even laugh:

"And some, more pessimistic, said/ That all the poets now were dead./

Blizzards of prose and epidemics/ Of deconstructionist polemics/ Had turned them all to academics."

Much more is here, and there is much more to be said about about a poet who reads his Bible, his Dante, his Shakespeare with both love and barbed wire in mind. (Try the unsparing "An Essay on Violence"). About a poetic vision that has appropriated self-mockery and compassion to a lifetime's searching of our mortal wounds. Weinfield's verse praises, protests, and would fly us out of our mortal prison.

When I read reviews of poetry, however, I usually find myself wanting to hear more from the poet than from the reviewer. After we love the poems, we might crave more biography, insight, criticism. So I want to leave you with the whole of Sonnet Ten, from the first section of the book:

"For years I journeyed in the Land of Prose;/ With other sojourners I sojourned there./ It was a land of Plenty, I suppose,/ But in the end I was a sojourner./ I was a person then, a character,/ And so I happened to encounter you./ It seemed that I had known you once somewhere,/ Though both of us were merely passing through./ How long ago it was I cannot say/ That I departed for the Land of Rhyme;/ But it was long ago and far away,/ And I am finished now with space and time./ When I arrived I learned that I was dead -- / And I am nothing now but what you read."

Now you know the kind of companionship these poems provide.