Notes for a Love Poem

Poetry. In NOTES FOR A LOVE POEM we listen to the magnificent ruminations of an insomniac, the blue hours around 3 a.m. fermenting du Passage's sensuous Southerner imagination. Her nightscape of Mozart and La Traviata when the quiet is her companion. Can the poet's anxiety be alleviated by her defiant love poem for Gérard, her husband for decades, now remarried? "You tell me orchids grow wild / all around your house / you share with your love / in Thailand now." Thailand, a world away from Mary in Louisiana. The NOTES have a wonderful rambling quality, freewheeling, as if we are privy to the poet's thinking, as if there is nothing not poem-worthy -- her Honda, her death wish, a catalogue's silk scarves, a friend's breast cancer. She serves pomegranate ice cream with Jane Austin, underscoring the nature of our lives, in its mix of the mundane and the exalted. The reader experiences so much pleasure as we taste the era du Passage writes from, sprinkled with the piquant flavors of the French language and heritage. Post-it-notes of the sublime.