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A review by rickyschneider
Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog by Paul Monette
4.0
"I would rather have this volume filed under AIDS than under Poetry, because if these words speak to anyone they are for those who are mad with loss, to let them know they are not alone." -Paul Monette
These are the soul-shattering reflections of the author's final days with his partner Rog as he succumbs to the AIDS virus. Heartbreaking is an ill-fitting understatement. Though often bleak, this cycle of poems expresses all the erratic emotions of grief. It oscillates between being devastatingly sad, then bitterly angry, then somehow managing a wistful sense of humor. It's difficult to rate someone's raw emotional reaction to watching the love of their life die in front of them. Regardless of any star rating, Monette clearly leaves his heart bleeding on each page of this book and it's beauty and importance is without question.
He wrote these with his pain still fresh and his wound still achingly open in the five months after his partner died. He wrote them almost back to back in a steady stream of sorrow. So it may be difficult to read, not only due to the subject matter but, because he uses no indentations or line breaks. This didn't really bother me because I felt it so effectively expressed his frenetic state of mind. It also had a deliberate intention behind it that I respect. In his preface Monette says, "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."
Monette's writing is luscious in intimate detail and vicious in it's emotional velocity. He invites the reader into the most beautiful moments of his relationship so long as they can stand the intense suffering they also endured together and that he continued on with alone. I didn't find his poems depressing as much as moving and unflinching.
While we (especially those of us who belong to the PREP generations) cannot possibly relate to or fully understand his experience, we can all empathize with his profound sense of loss. He himself says that writing this saved him and I know that his vulnerability and honesty in its pages has done the same for so many others and will only continue to save more. It's devastating to think that if these men were living through this now, the outcome would probably have been much different. We may not enjoy reading their painful experiences but, because we do enjoy the luxury of living in a time when AIDS is no longer a death sentence, as it was for Rog, we at least owe them the honoring of their memory through reading their story and acknowledging how very fortunate we are.
"If we're lucky some far-off men of our sort, generations hence, a pair of dreamy types strolling among the hill graves... in a time when dying is not all day and every house riven, they'll laugh 'Here's 2 like us'"
These are the soul-shattering reflections of the author's final days with his partner Rog as he succumbs to the AIDS virus. Heartbreaking is an ill-fitting understatement. Though often bleak, this cycle of poems expresses all the erratic emotions of grief. It oscillates between being devastatingly sad, then bitterly angry, then somehow managing a wistful sense of humor. It's difficult to rate someone's raw emotional reaction to watching the love of their life die in front of them. Regardless of any star rating, Monette clearly leaves his heart bleeding on each page of this book and it's beauty and importance is without question.
He wrote these with his pain still fresh and his wound still achingly open in the five months after his partner died. He wrote them almost back to back in a steady stream of sorrow. So it may be difficult to read, not only due to the subject matter but, because he uses no indentations or line breaks. This didn't really bother me because I felt it so effectively expressed his frenetic state of mind. It also had a deliberate intention behind it that I respect. In his preface Monette says, "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."
Monette's writing is luscious in intimate detail and vicious in it's emotional velocity. He invites the reader into the most beautiful moments of his relationship so long as they can stand the intense suffering they also endured together and that he continued on with alone. I didn't find his poems depressing as much as moving and unflinching.
While we (especially those of us who belong to the PREP generations) cannot possibly relate to or fully understand his experience, we can all empathize with his profound sense of loss. He himself says that writing this saved him and I know that his vulnerability and honesty in its pages has done the same for so many others and will only continue to save more. It's devastating to think that if these men were living through this now, the outcome would probably have been much different. We may not enjoy reading their painful experiences but, because we do enjoy the luxury of living in a time when AIDS is no longer a death sentence, as it was for Rog, we at least owe them the honoring of their memory through reading their story and acknowledging how very fortunate we are.
"If we're lucky some far-off men of our sort, generations hence, a pair of dreamy types strolling among the hill graves... in a time when dying is not all day and every house riven, they'll laugh 'Here's 2 like us'"