Instinct – ‘poems of desire’ by Joel Lane

Flarestack Poets 2012

23 poems by Joel Lane

“I miss the loneliness that was ours
to share, when we walked in the city
and explored its waste ground. …”

A rarified experience in poem-absorption for me, as we cross serial frontiers of blank album tracks and pinned shadows and other stubs of things: a sense of love in often unnatural enjambment, while paradoxically the poems themselves seem somehow artfully to have a natural enjambment.  Tomorrow, when I re-read the poems – as I must – such (un)naturalness will become vice versa, I predict, with each reading changing, if only a bit, the meaning of the previous reading … forever?  The unfree buildings of emotional relationship as free verse. Then vice versa again? It is impossible of course to do justice to these dark panoplies as we scale the poems from story to story within their inferred brutalist architecture.  A constructed, constructive sadness and pent up eroticism although ‘eroticism’ is not the right word and I can’t think of the right word. Perhaps tomorrow. Perfect notes of memory sweeping back and forth.

[My previous takes on Joel Lane work: here here here]