Loving in Truth

Reviews / Votes

'Angels are impossible,' writes Jay Rogoff in his powerful new book, Loving in Truth, and indeed no other poet writing today explores more deeply and convincingly the problematic nature of the ideal, how our hungers long both to affirm and transcend the given with the made. 'Nature bores me,' he boldly claims, voicing thus the aestheticist inheritance of the amorous eye. For this too is nature, his, and yet just one extreme in a dialectical sensibility, at once symbolist and realist, incantatory and clear-eyed, enthralled and yet, by reverie and suffering alike, wise. For the 'dazzle of the world,' by eyes invented and revealed, is 'at once redeeming and reducing.' We would be hard-pressed to find a poetics more animated by the paradoxes of love: more adept at giving flesh to metaphysics and weightless longing; more pinned, by sharp and radiant detail, to a retreating past. A stunning book. Jay Rogoff's poems are a joy. Loving in Truth, reminds us, with its allusion to Sidney, that these verses are meant to give pleasure, both to the beloved (a frequent subject here) and to us. New poems-on Adam and Eve, on love in middle age-stand beside selections from a distinguished career. Characteristically deft and affecting, his Hechtean sequence 'Danses Macabres' is particularly winning. A deft and bracing collection!