The Faber book of Blue Verse : Making Love to Marilyn Monroe

by Various

Making Love to Marilyn Monroe: The Faber Book of Blue Verse presents a variety of candidly sexual verse through the centuries from Catullus and Chaucer to modern poets like T.S. Eliot, Kingsley Amis, Seamus Heaney, James Fenton, Kit Wright, Craig Raine and Wendy Cope. Here the bawdy goes hand in hand with emotional, intellectual, confessional, and satirical touching tributes to that perennially fascinating subject - sex.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Various is the correct author for any book with multiple unknown authors, and is acceptable for books with multiple known authors, especially if not all are known or the list is very long (over 50).

If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.

Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent collection which tries to cover a bit of everyone, from the expected ancients like Catullus and Martial, through the usual suspects from English lit such as Rochester and Donne, up to some more recent experiments.

It was nice to see old favourites of mine, like Wendy Cope's ‘Prelude’:

It wouldn't be a good idea
To let him stay.
When they knew each other better –
Not today.
But she put on her new black knickers
Anyway.

There were also plenty of new ones on me, such as Patrick O'Shaughnessy's ‘Endpiece’:

Here lies the body of Patrick
Who served Aphrodite delightedly.
Even when quite geriatric
He still raised a nightie excitedly.

There are poems I had forgotten about, like Craig Raine's dazzlingly inventive ‘Sexual Couplets’, an amazing mix of icky and hilarious and (as always with Raine) aggressively unclichéd:

Here we are, without our clothes,
one excited watering-can, one peculiar rose…

My shoe-tree wants to come,
and stretch your body where it lies undone…

I am wearing a shiny sou'wester;
you are coxcombed like a jester…

Oh my strangely gutted one,
the fish head needs your flesh around its bone…

We move in anapaestic time and pause,
until my body rhymes with yours…

In the valley of your arse,
all flesh is grass, all flesh is grass…

One damp acorn on the tweedy sod –
then the broad bean dangles in its pod…

And of course the purely fun, which invite imitation:

There was a young lady of Exeter
So pretty that men craned their necks at her,
And one went so far
As to wave from his car
The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.

There are many examples too of poets who have used the erotic mode to make more serious points; most are too long to quote here, but honorable mentions for Carol Ann Duffy, Fleur Adcock, e.e. cummings, and some raised eyebrows at unexpected appearances from the marginalia of TS Eliot and Robert Burns.

Unfortunately sexiness in verse works best in small doses; lumping it all together diminishes the shock value and with it the intended effect. A pleasure to browse through all the same. Leave it on the bedside table in your spare room to confuse and embarrass guests.

[^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book undoubtedly impossible to beat for variety, astute observation, well-tempered humour, some sadness, imagination, fact, and an awful lot of fun. From Ovid and Martial to Fleur Adcock and Simon Rae, all, and please believe me, ALL life is here. Just as I was thinking “Ahha; I don’t think we’ve had any venereal disease yet,” well there it was! Therein too I discovered erotic musings on fake tan, The Archers (BBC Radio), cod-liver oil & orange juice … I’ll say no more. Read this anthology of savour, and delight in it yourself.

To have read “The Faber Book of Blue Verse” straight through from cover to cover is wonderfully intoxicating. As I said above, all life heaves, throbs, and sighs between these hard covers.

It’s also been something of a revelation to discover, en masse, how so much more apt and expressive verse is to this subject than is written prose. There’s absolutely no veneer of superficiality, sheer fantasy, nor of clumsy embarrassment. The triumph of metre and verse over prose is perfect and complete. Shred / e-delete your ‘mummy / boy porn’ now. Where’s your sense of self-worth?

A different reading scheme might be to slow down and dwell only upon one chapter at a time, over several days or even weeks: “That House of Pleasure”; “The Daily Round”; “Youth and Age”; “It Certainly Is”; “On The Rocks”; “Imagine”; “Wicked Words”; “Name Calling”; “Parts of the Body, Mostly Male”; “Getting Religion”; “Last Words”; “Everyone Sang”. Such a denial and frugality in the pace of reading; allowing time for thoughts to dwell, would be interesting. Reading Group anyone?

Because this book is thrice indexed, by Poets, Titles, and First Lines, it is also easy to opt to read the varied work of a specific poet, or by the most sublime / ridiculous / intriguing first lines. This is an anthology both of seriously high quality; and engagement; a good-to-read aloud book (in the right company, of course); a book not only to laugh over and to be loved; but also to reveal pensive thoughts and sad regrets that for some, sex is not always a pleasure exercised for good.

Do not be misled; this is emphatically NOT a book of Romantic verse. It is Explicit, yes, with a capital “E”. To put it coyly, by no means every action has reproduction as its purpose. Not a book that any responsible adult will leave lying around for minors to find; but one which, I think, would make a very original, and fun, wedding or civil partnership present. It may do equally as well, possibly even better, as a diamond wedding gift.

Highly recommended.