Pleasure

Brian Teare

Like Tennyson’s In Memorium, Teare’s book sees within a personal loss evidence of an epochal shift at work, a shift at once historical, political, and cosmological. Asserting the lover’s body as a lost Eden, revisiting again and again the narrative of “the fall”—its iconic imagery as well as Gnostic reinterpretations—the book also records the eventual end of mourning and a return to the ecology not of myth but of the literal weather and landscape of California. The book is haunted throughout by the task of “writing the disaster” of AIDS; its lyrics link emergency to inquiry in an attempt to make a memorial “in language sufficient/to pain : not in itself the world : the thought of it.”

“In the old myth, Adam named the names in paradise—each word, in its way, created in Eden its own Eden, a word not of essence, but essential, a word as palpable as the body it called to itself, an erotic word because a creative one. But Eden is not easy. To speak of it is to cast ourselves out from it; a word is paradise, at least until our breath runs out. Brian Teare’s Pleasure takes upon itself the important work of remembering that Adam is for us still the erotic source from which words work their awful magic—a magic that can return to life a lover slowly dying, a lover lost to death, the page as the impossible paradise of continued life. The syllable’s moment is a quick life and a carnal knowledge. But Teare sings a song that being sung comes to know itself, a knowledge that casts it out of itself, that understands that in the very midst of its audacious life lurks a darker compensation, the thought of death nearing, and death that nears. I know of no other poet right now returning his readers with such fervent beauty and stark intelligence into the very difficulty of the words in which he writes—these elegiac words that reverse death as a final consequence to life that are themselves mortal. Desolation strikes an abandoned note inside devotion, but does not cancel out the whole. The whole music is an old music, a music Brian Teare still hears, still says is our music, as Eden is but a figure of the day, and these oldest myths are but our daily life when that life by the poet—in difficulty and grace—becomes for us once again naked and exposed.” —Dan Beachy-Quick

“The painful rip of the body away from a state of erotic joy to one of stunned aloneness is here explored in a garden of strange and thorny flowers, a garden in which the poet is tempted by the gnostic vision of reality, because it is so cruelly true to his experience.” —Fanny Howe

“Brian Teare is a master poet. He can ‘write rain into the picture’ and make the written word seem real. But here, in Pleasure, he refuses to do so. He resists the way the lyric attempts to lull us or protect us from pain. In these poems language fails. The form, the poem, paper, the lyric—even pain fails. And in this failure I am moved beyond words, through words, and brought back to pleasure, to freedom, to the perfect weather of true grief, to the spectacular disaster that is life. I have not read a book like this for a long time. It is painfully good.” —Rachel Zucker