An Auto-Erotic History of Swings

by Patricia Young

Patricia Young's latest book of poems dances, cavorts and sings through the prehistory of our species. Epic in scope, An Auto-Erotic History of Swings is about sex and God and sublime imagination. Quotations from Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), an English physician who studied and wrote widely about human sexuality and argued with Freud, provide springboards for a variety of narrators in the first section. A quieter wistful voice asserts itself as the second section unfolds and the voice of God closes the book. Young has taken snapshots of reality and dream and collaged the snippets into finely crafted poems and shaped the whole work into an end-of-the-world text. This is a sermon for the body, from the body, the antidote to apathy, as stated in a poem from the point of view of an erection. This is a dervish of a book, whose images in quantity and variety rival those adorning Indian temples that deify and celebrate physical human love. The poems are almost never still, except when the eternal moment at the centre of a loving relationship is briefly revealed. They spin in their own orbits, taking on gender issues and feminism, ecological issues, the domestic sphere. Patricia Young's voices call for a new look at our bodies and for fresh insights into relationship. Here is a fanfare to relationships place in the human enterprise inspired by an unstoppable up-welling of human spirit.

112 pages, Paperback

Published September 25, 2010