Adultery Poems

Adultery with its pleasure, pain and outrage! No one writes the poetry of adultery as does Nancy Holmes. For her guide, she takes the poet Ovid who schools her in his tender cynicism and teaches her the art of love. When she capitulates to the temptations of bad love, the poems themselves speak up and scold her into behaving properly (or improperly). When she pauses to consider her wayward ways or guilty conscience, the poems remind her that poetry is where wild abandon meets control, that her life and follies are the fuel for art. "Shut up and make love, you crazy fool," they shout. Ultimately she is forced into the most rigid poetic straightjacket of all -- the sonnet -- where she learns her lessons well. As Holmes shows, no matter how ridiculously one behaves or how poorly one chooses, the adventure of lust and love is one of the deepest pleasures of our adult life. Through love we are transformed into sensual slaves, life's clowns and criminals, but these roles must be embraced or we miss out on one of the great experiences of life. The spirit of Ovid hovers over these wry, sad and comic poems, reminding us that it was always thus, for men and women, both.

Table of Contents:
Picking Tulips; The Wrong Frame of Mind; When We Hadn't Kissed Yet; What Do I Want?; Whoops, A Speeding Ticket; Latin for "Ditch"; No Longer An Even Keel: The Voyage Begins; A New Year's Day Ending; The Love Triangle; The Pronouncement; The Adulteress in a Ditch; The Adulteress in her Season; The Adulteress and the Poem; The Adulteress on the Beach; The Adulteress and the Confession; The Adulteress and the Communicable Disease; The Adulteress, Lunch and Masturbation; The Adulteress and the Bear Story; The Adulteress Transported at the Dentist's; The Adulteress Wants a Love Poem; The Adulteress Tries to Speak; The Adulteress' Desk is Affronted; Travels in the Fall; Revision; Known in the Community for My Perversions; Honest; Silly Poems by Silly Female Poets; On the Future Occasion of the Lover Reading the Poems; The Poet Envies the Musician Her instrument; Keats and the Nectarine; The Wild Doe in the Woods; Can a Sonnet Be a Joke?; How She Abandons the Renaissance Poets; But Learns Her Squash Lesson Well; She Thinks of Yeats in the Middle of it All; So Does She Hate Love?; There is the Problem of the Old Recollected; If So, What Colour Are His Eyes?; Can She Play 'With His Metaphor?; Sonnet 51, or She Keeps Coming Back; And Going Down; Smoking is a Major Cause of Heart Disease; Vita Nuova; What He Knows; The Last Lesson She Has to Learn; Quick Work, or an Affair Cut Short; Pain and Pleasure in the Latin Quarter; Tempests at Sea, or Troubles on Shore; SS Abject; In; In the Mansion; I Know, But Can't Remember, Why I Did It; Watching the Weed Whacker in the Cemetery; Waste; The Curse of Having Written Love Poems That Mean Nothing Now; Oh Lords of Ladies Intellectual; Insomnia Afterwards; Peel River Bridge, Yukon Territory; The Two Meanings of Cleave; Turning Loose the Swans.

About the Author :
Nancy Holmes has published four collections of poetry, most recently Mandorla (2005). She has lived in Alberta, Ontario, and, most recently, British Columbia, where she teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna.

Review :
"The Adultery Poems is a wonderful lusty and sophisticated book! With the lubriciousness of a female Ovid, Holmes makes love to language, each poem polished and slicked with her tongue until it gleams. This is a book to take to bed, to read under the covers. 'Open me, ' it says, and you must."