The Disorder of Love
Gutter Press
1997
Now published in Grace and Poison
These are poems about serious lust and serious love--for friends, for lands home and away, for family. Sometimes wild, sometimes quietly vibrant, the borders of this work are hard to define, as are the women and men Connelly celebrates in these pages: the junkie Voula dancing rembetiko with her lovers, the gifted guitar player who serenades the poet up in an old colonial house, the elusive temptress named Jazz.
Wild sexual delight animates these pages, as well as the rage and despair of passion spurned--one commentator compared some of the poems in The Disorder of Love to Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
But desperation shape-shifts into desire of a different order when the poems return to the Greek island of Lesvos, Connelly’s second home. “I’ve dreamt my body as a storm, / but this season the calm rolls closer / from the east. / Across the water the hills of Turkey / shimmer and sway like a purple caravan.”
The most remarkable part of the work arrives at the end, when the poet gives her readers the rare, illuminated chaos of joy.
REVIEWS
“. . Experiences, landscapes and intimacies have been rendered in exhilarating, sensuous movement with language so lush, voices so vibrant, and rhythms so resonant that the poems often seem to read, even perform, themselves. . . Connelly has wrought searing poetry.”
- Canadian Literature, Spring 1997