Surrealist Love Poems (Hardcover)

by Mary Ann Caws (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Erotic, impassioned and necrophilic, the 60 works gathered in Surrealist Love Poems celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love. "I want to sleep with you side by side.... Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia/ Stretched out on your shadow/ Hammered by your tongue/ To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth/ Happy," writes Joyce Mansour. City University of New York comparative literature professor Mary Ann Caws places poems by major surrealist writers like Andr‚ Breton and Paul Eluard, along with the poetry of Picasso, Dal¡ and Frida Kahlo, side by side with 14 lushly printed and alluring b&w photos by the likes of Man Ray, Lee Miller and Claude Cahun.

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Review
"Erotic, impassioned and necrophilic, the sixty works gathered in Surrealist Love Poems celebrate the idea of obsessive and transformative love. 'I want to sleep with you side by side.... Stretched out on your shadow / Hammered by your tongue / To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth / Happy' writes Joyce Mansour.... Caws places poems by major surrealist writers like Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, along with the poetry of Picasso, Dali, and Frida Kahlo, side by side with fourteen lushly printed and alluring black-and-white photos by the likes of Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun." - Publishers Weekly "If you just... said 'That's enough, I must buy this book and read it aloud to my beloved under the sheets, at whatever the price'... you'd be in good shape.... These poems, and Caws's condensed history of surrealism, provide a wonderful reminder of how powerful and necessary are the voices of the irrational.... These are exotic recipes for a strange feast." - Cary Tennis, Salon"

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (February 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226098710
• ISBN-13: 978-0226098715
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,231,119 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Of course it's a good review... you expected different?, December 28, 2004

By	Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Surrealist Love Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

I'm not really sure how to approach a critique of this book. For being only a hundred twenty pages, with a number of those taken up with photographs, notes, bibliography, etc., there's a great deal to be said about it. Caws is a noted surrealist biographer/critic/sociologist, and so it's to be assumed that her opening essay is going to be knowledgeable, authoritative, etc. And it is, of course. It doesn't go into the detail of many of her other excellent works on the subject, but starts the book off nicely. The poems themselves are translated (with, if memory serves, a few exceptions) by Caws herself, and all are new translations, which invites the reader to go hunting for the Collected Poems of the various poets represented (and any other translations; especially helpful here will be Michael Benedikt's The Poetry of Surrealism, a must-have in any case) to compare translations. Reading three or four translations of a short poem side-by-side will give the reader a much deeper sense of the poem and the many inflections of meaning it can have, and so any new translation of foreign poetry is a welcome one, especially a new translation of surrealist work. The photographs are chosen with great care and set the poems off well (one of the book's few proofreading shortcomings is that the page numbers listed in the back often don't correspond with the actual pages on which the photographs fall; it's easy to figure out what's what, though). The poems themselves are chosen with equal care, and while it's certainly not an exhaustive rendering of the world of surrealist love poems, which might not be possible in a book ten times the size of this, it's an excellent introduction to the machinery and mechanism that drove the core of the surrealist movement, and an interesting survey of where it went over the decades following its founding. As with all anthologies, it makes an excellent starting point for the reader interested in surrealism; find your favorites, track down the Selected, Collected, etc., and start reading. The upside of this collection, like that of The Poetry of Surrealism, is that the work chosen is of such a consistent quality that the reader can pen to a random page and find another writer whose work to go hunting.

Excellent. ****

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fish, April 2, 2003

By	Alan Crowell (Boulder, Colorado United States) - See all my reviews

Did you say surreal? Actually I found it oleaginous without being too... huh... rococo. Yeah - that's it. Florid, though less... what's the word I'm looking for... unctuous. Yes - well, anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this.