Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog

I had no idea that a simple page of unpunctuated emotion could grind at your heart and make you cry the way this does, easily. It is raw, angry, despairing and loving all at once, you feel as if the poems are Monette's one strand of hope, a lifeline desperately connecting him to existence in the months after Roger's death. These literally take your breath away, they are a rollercoaster of heartbreak and desperation, grabbing some vital organ inside of you and not letting go until the poem's been read. I would give these six, seven, twenty three stars if I could, because this is the purpose of literature, to preserve human emotion and experience. These poems do that exquisitely.

This is a book that will make you believe.In all its rawness of pain and love and longing and anguish, it's for reading when you think that your heart is going to break or your chest is going to burst; for when you think you believe in love no longer, this book will show it to you in all of its great glory and power and grief; when you despair, you see in this book your pain reflected and yet it makes you believe there is still something more than that pain; and when you feel alone, it shows you that it truly is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Yes, it is intense, and yes, it does kind of crush in around you/blow you away, depending how you look at it, but in the words of the author himself:"These elegies were written during the five months after he died, one right after the other, with hardly a half day's pause between ..... I have let them stand as raw as they came. But because several friends have wished for a few commas or a stanza break here and there, I feel I should make a comment on their form. I don't mean them to be impregnable, though I admit I want them to allow no escape, like a hospital room, or indeed a mortal illness."My words really don't do this book justice, so I'll quote what the professional critics have to say about this---"As poems, these elegies are wonderful, their images and language unforgettable. But nothing I have ever read prepared me for the intensity, the sheer pain, the beauty, the ALIVENESS of these poems about death. Love Alone is an incredible rarity. This book is about life, but it is life electrified, seen as we have never seen it. In this work, life and literature fuse and capture a dimension of experience rarely felt and even more rarely given voice. This is surely one of the most powerful books I've ever read. It is searing and it is magnificent." ~Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

It is worth buying the book simply for the first poem, "Here". Each of the pieces moves at a fever pitch, leaving the reader unable to pause even for breath, until the poem ends and leaves you holding the book, wanting more, but needing a break, unable to turn the page. They wear you out reading them, but in the best way possible. Monette documents the death of his partner, and the knowledge of his own advancing illness, and he does so in a way that takes you with him : you feel the urgency, pain, sadness, beauty, love, and preciousness of life right along with the poet. Love Alone isn't poems that just tell you things. It puts them in your hands.

This is a book to carry with you. Unfortunately I did, and lost it. The effort I've put into trying to get another copy is testament to the power and eloquence of the eighteen poems it contains. This work juxtaposes the power of love and the raveges of death with humbling clraity and emotion. I used it to uplift me when I lost faith in life, and inspire me when I lost direction in my work. Mr Monette says in his preface that it was written almost without pause in the months after his lover's death. The immediacy of his grief, the violence in his anger and the vivid importance of his memories take you with terryfying force into those months. And when you are there, you cannot help but feel the anger and injustice and, overwhelmingly, feel the love that he and Roger shared. I sound sycophantic. I know. But this book puts me in a difficult position becuse it is truly how I feel. When promised love goes wrong, I read these poems, always alone and late at night. When I can't remember why I spend my days thinking up ways to stop more gay men becomming infected with HIV, I read these poems to remind me what happens when people are ignored. I'm hoping a copy can be found to replace the one I lost.