West of yesterday, east of summer

Description

A selection of poems from the late author's previous poetry collections, including the award-winning Love Alone, is combined with new poems, many focusing on the loss of his lover, who also died of AIDS.

Description

Paul Monette began his writing life as a poet. For ten years he worked exclusively in that genre, producing two much-admired collections, The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975) and No Witnesses (1981). Monette then turned to writing novels and did not return to poetry until almost a decade later, when AIDS cut down his lover, Roger Horwitz. Sporadically during Roger's twenty-month illness, Monette began to experiment with a form that would express the careening anxiety and the overwhelming sense of exile that had engulfed the two men. After Roger died in 1986, Monette wrote a stunning series of elegies for his friend, a monumental and wholly original effusion of the fury and madness of grief. Those elegies appeared from St. Martin's Press in 1988 as Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, garnering many awards and changing the face of AIDS in literature. Since then he has written a varied group of poems, some more formal, some in a torrent of language reminiscent of Love Alone. . In West of Yesterday, East of Summer, this impressive body of work has been brought together to reveal the extraordinary diversity of his career as a poet, from the sublime to the heroic. Monette has provided an illuminating Introduction which places the work in context and challenges the very idea of what poetry is for.

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