Heavenly Sex

Heavenly Sex is a book of poems about varieties of love, sacred and profane, particularly as experienced by a young man who has recently lost his mother. It is, at the same time, as noted by Robert Bly, a celebration of one of the more unusual father-son relationships. In one poem the son observes his distraught father as he seeks to win the affections of a beautiful new companion. Claiming to quote scripture, the father says, " A woman's breasts are the Ten Commandments, the two tablets of God's law. One for what God allows, one for what He doesn't." " The way we make love, " he goes on, " is the way God will be with us." A self-taught Russian immigrant, drawing on a variety of ancient mystical doctrines, the father emerges as the book's central figure.As critic William Minor observed, Sward presents " abstruse or complex concerns in a manner that is refreshingly straightforward, even simple" at the same time he manages to tell a story, " providing a continuous narrative thread, yet remaining totally lyrical at the same time." Heavenly Sex is, in addition, a book about family and offers vivid demonstrations of the ways in which one's parents, grandparents, and one's children, live on inside one.Part II is made up of a selection of Sward's, until recently, out-of-print animal poems, "Uncle Dog: the Poet at 9, "Scarlet the Parrot and others. "Report from the Front, the final section, is more political and satirical in tone, as illustrated by "Fellatio Pinocchio, 1950s-1960s and the tour de force, "45 Poets Named Robert.