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Islands of Intimacy: Love Poems 1970-2000
Islands of Intimacy Love Poems 19702000 Author:Denys Trussell Denys Trussell is a poet, classical pianist and biographer resident in Auckland. He has published six volumes of poetry, a prize-winning biography of A. R. D. Fairburn and a biographical study of the painter, Alan Pearson. As a poet he has worked closely with musicians and dancers. Works such as Dance of the Origin and Archipelago have been se... more »t to music and dance by a variety of artists including Alison East and Ivan Zagni. In 1999 Denys was shortlisted for the Montana awards with Walking into the Millennium. Composer Peter Scholes has since set this to music. Islands of Intimacy: Love Poems 1970-2000 is a collection that spans his writing career and its imagery draws heavily on nature and the New Zealand landscape. This volume contains notes on the poems and his essay on the erotic in verse.
"Listen through your calm as she
pervades, her wild vowelled tide
breaking over you in stone cold cities,
leading you down the salt glades of the apbrodite keening in her
flesh to incur desire." Love is an ocean, and these poems a logbook of voyages made into its waters. Incalculable as the sea, as dangerous, as beautiful, the process of love has the perennial quality of seasonal cycles or the ebb and onset of tides. Etched briefly onto the face of this ocean are wakes made by particular lovers meeting, parting in fragile vessels of the self. Those who best know such journeys have learned to hear the evolutionary music of eros sounding in the depths, to allow its power, to be moved by its creative intent: