Wade Stevenson’s LOVE AT THE END reviewed

Wade Stevenson’s latest book, LOVE AT THE END, has been reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp in London Grip, the international online cultural magazine. Here is an excerpt of the review:

The first thing you notice about Wade Stevenson’s verse is the lack of punctuation. Since all the lines begin with capital letters, this can make it difficult to parse sentences, but the sense of longing and the celebration of love are unambiguous throughout. It’s a deep, cosmic, metaphysical longing for all the women of his life, the relationships both real and potential, and, mystically, a longing for love itself. “Where Is the Amor of Ages Ago?” echoes the longing of the famous ballad by the 15th century poet François Villon, “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” in which the concluding line laments, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” Stevenson writes:

Where are the snows of yesteryear?
Where the music of Amor that has no name?

Earlier in the poem, he enumerates these lost loves: “My wife, my child, my lover, my mother.” As he writes in “My Birthing Lament,” this sense of longing comes with the territory of being alive, from the very “salty trauma of the coming / Into being.”

Life to life, death to death, the essential mystery
Keeps receding the more you try to dig within
The original blood ache remains ingrained
While the seasons come and go the less you know
Or care to know except for that one desert-blooming
Midnight lament, O Mama, take me home

The word “longing” recurs throughout, in “In the Night Room” (“Will you find the lost face your longing was seeking”); “Racing to the Light” (“all the days / Of a limitless longing”); “Tell Me a Tale” (“the longing / Lasting until the darkness comes”); “I Had Ideas of Death” (“I wanted summers of August, / Aprils of spring, mornings of May, Septembers / Of longing”); “My Future Invisible” (“But the longing I had was to go beyond life”), “What’s Left of Love” (“What is endured is a life-long longing”), and “Danger” (“You always wanted to belong / To your own infinite longing”). This intense longing amounts to a “Sorrow in a Minor Key,” a poem in which Stevenson describes and celebrates that yearning, always lurking in the background, for some ideal state of being – love, Amor – that’s been part of us – part of the poet, at any rate – from the very beginning. “What remains is the pain in a minor key / Of what we lived but never knew enough of love.”

Read Charles’ review in London Grip
https://londongrip.co.uk/2022/03/london-grip-poetry-review-wade-stevenson/

Read more excerpts from, or buy, Wade Stevenson’s LOVE AT THE END here