Appreciating Grevel Lindop's poetry collection: Playing With Fire

This collection of poetry, published by Carcanet, hurls the reader into an intimacy and beauty that resonates mysterium and sensual delight. Here a father squeezes fresh lemon juice on a tuna salad; now a dancer slaps her palms onto the night stage; now brothers scatter ashes in a barley field; all action divulges this: We flame. Here’s one of my favorite poems from this collection.

Myth

So many things to make a galaxy:
the flutter of my tongue between your lips—
butterfly shivering a salted rockpool,
breaking the sea’s meniscus into tumult;
your hands, moulding me up like growing clay
your mouth tasting and ripening what you’d made;
you, turning over, pulling me on top;
the elements combining, heavens opening,
primeval floods.
Then how you sighed and stretched,
shook a night sky of hair back from your face
and, with the lazy splendour of a goddess,
strolled to the bathroom; leaving in your wake
that trail of white stars on the bedroom floor.

To read the whole collection over and over gives the reader a sense of the rhythm that echoes at The Core, the even beat at the center of the softest spot within the Queen of Intimacy’s rib cage.

If you are a reader, like me, who loves to read as much as you love to make love (and if you sometimes even mistake those two activities one for the other), you just must check out the poem “Ars Poetica.” Yes! We’ll meet in the nightclub of dreamworks!