If Love's Not Lost Poem by gershon hepner

If love’s not love until it’s lost,
when it can be transformed to art,
enjoying it entails a cost
which should cause artists to lose heart,
but it’s not true that love must be
transformed to memories before
it’s real. You needn’t hear the plea
of ravens saying “Nevermore! ”
in order to appreciate
true love, but if you ever lose it,
art may help you to sublimate
its loss, unless you should abuse it.

August Kleinzahler reviews “Selected Poems” by James Merrill, edited by J.H. McCaltchy and Stephen Yenser in the NYT Book Review (“Changing Light, ” November 9,2008) :
The operative word with Merrill’s work is recherché in its English usage, meaning exquisite, refined, lavishly elegant, exotic, obscure. No writer was more important to Merrill than Marcel Proust, to whom Merrill pays homage in one of his finest poems, “For Proust, ” in the 1962 collection “Water Street.” That volume also contains “An Urban Convalescence” and “Swimming by Night, ” both poems of memory and both gems, especially “An Urban Convalescence.” McClatchy and Yenser write in their introduction: “Merrill believed, with Marcel Proust, that the only true paradise is a lost paradise. Love is not fully itself until it is lost, until it becomes memory, then becomes art.”


11/10/08