CRIMES OF PASSION

by Terry Stokes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1972

Crimes of passion are committed out of love as well as hate, and perhaps it is just as wrong to intrude into someone else's loneliness as to abridge it in a more violent way: ""I will shelter anyone/ who needs it, it's always been/ my problem."" These are poems written in the language of the everyday that achieve unassuming nostalgic beauty more by juxtaposition of the ordinary and the sublime (""the table/is crowded & we are sobbing away our lives"") than by rhetorical devices or adjectival embellishment. They are filled with the stuff of midwestern life: beer, snow covered fields, spam, dead animals -- also images that form our tinseled dreams: Ed Sullivan, James Dean, Santo & Johnny, a girl named ""Tits."" The majority are personal, but some are rather brilliant stabs at the American psyche that go way past propaganda or anger into the heart of our mythology: ""I am the crud between your teeth/after a big slab of ham./ I. am the priest of your nostrils/as your sinuses flow/with the weather,"" or the gentler but sadder ""Stars rust/ in the water of my eyes. I have run/ to the end of my world"" of a man on his way to retirement in Florida. In short, a collection of beautiful, precise, effective poems, by an author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New American Review.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION