Packing up for Paradise: Selec (Hardcover)

The theme of this copious selection from fifty years of James Broughton's poetry is Eros Ascendant and Transcendent. Since that's been Broughton's central theme all along, it's fair to say this book comprises his essential poetic testament.

Broughton's verse is deceptively simple, spirit-deep. Innocence and double-entendre lyric foolery commingle in light verse' that revives the inspired nonsense / crazy wisdom line of Christopher Smart, William Blake and Edward Lear, while Other poems feature the out' glories of romantic ardor, reawakening the rhapsodic warmth of Whitman's Calamus:

Ablaze in the thrusts of desire

we scathed each other with verve burned up our fears of forever steamed ourselves deep in surrender till I lay drenched under scorch and joy cried out through my crown

Wondrous Wondrous the merge

Wondrous the merge of soulmates

the surprises of recognition

Wondrous the flowerings of renewal Wondrous the wings of the air

clapping their happy approval

Whether writing in parable, fairy tale, fable, riddle, ballad, nursery rhyme, children's song, or up-to-the-minute graphic soul-confession, this sly master of a thousand tricks of form -- an ebullient Pan lurking in the libidinal weeds of postmodernism -- is also the one major contemporary poet of whom it can be said his work is almost entirely affirmative, even celebrative. However indecorous, irreverent, challenging of assumption, or audaciously disturbing, James Broughton's poetry always lands squarely on the side of life.