Surrealist Love Poems

Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Surrealist Love Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2002) I'm not really sure how to approach a critique of this book. For being only a hundred twenty pages, with a number of those taken up with photographs, notes, bibliography, etc., there's a great deal to be said about it. Caws is a noted surrealist biographer/critic/sociologist, and so it's to be assumed that her opening essay is going to be knowledgeable, authoritative, etc. And it is, of course. It doesn't go into the detail of many of her other excellent works on the subject, but starts the book off nicely. The poems themselves are translated (with, if memory serves, a few exceptions) by Caws herself, and all are new translations, which invites the reader to go hunting for the Collected Poems of the various poets represented (and any other translations; especially helpful here will be Michael Benedikt's The Poetry of Surrealism, a must-have in any case) to compare translations. Reading three or four translations of a short poem side-by-side will give the reader a much deeper sense of the poem and the many inflections of meaning it can have, and so any new translation of foreign poetry is a welcome one, especially a new translation of surrealist work. The photographs are chosen with great care and set the poems off well (one of the book's few proofreading shortcomings is that the page numbers listed in the back often don't correspond with the actual pages on which the photographs fall; it's easy to figure out what's what, though). The poems themselves are chosen with equal care, and while it's certainly not an exhaustive rendering of the world of surrealist love poems, which might not be possible in a book ten times the size of this, it's an excellent introduction to the machinery and mechanism that drove the core of the surrealist movement, and an interesting survey of where it went over the decades following its founding. As with all anthologies, it makes an excellent starting point for the reader interested in surrealism; find your favorites, track down the Selected, Collected, etc., and start reading. The upside of this collection, like that of The Poetry of Surrealism, is that the work chosen is of such a consistent quality that the reader can pen to a random page and find another writer whose work to go hunting. Excellent. ****

Did you say surreal? Actually I found it oleaginous without being too... huh... rococo. Yeah - that's it. Florid, though less... what's the word I'm looking for... unctuous. Yes - well, anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this.