Black Pearl

Albert DeGenova’s Black Pearl, poems of love, sex and regret is available now from Purple Flag Press.

Review by Jennifer Finstrom for Eclectica magazine. Click here to read the online review.

I find it difficult to think of a book that is more intimate than Albert DeGenova’s Black Pearl: Poems of Love, Sex and Regret and at the same time so connected to universal themes. The subtitle itself gives us that universality—we know at the outset, to some extent, what we will be seeing as readers. The frank intimacy on the page makes the connection to love and sex clear, but the idea of regret was one I teased out of various poems as I read and one I followed in a variety of directions through the book.

I found the idea of regret connected to time and its passing in many of these poems, and once I began reading for this idea of time, I found it almost everywhere and could almost imagine I heard a clock ticking as I turned the pages. For example, this collection gives us nights that pass too quickly, words left unsaid, and “the front porch of old age.” This last phrase comes from “Intimacy Cocktail,” a poem that looks at much that is desired, “the taste of heather honey and fireworks,” but leaves us, at the poem’s conclusion, near life’s end with lingering thoughts of the past. And while we may regret a past relationship has ended, in this book, desire itself is never regretted. Memory is a valuable coin here that can buy us much, but nonetheless, time is always passing.

The idea of time is given meaning here through being anchored in both places and artifacts. The artifacts in question are often photographs, and we see them at the beginning of the poem in “Seconds Make Years.” The poem begins with “Curling, creased photos tossed / across our bed of tangled / blue sheets,” and that beginning places memory directly in the bed, where it will remain throughout the collection. This poem, as many of its siblings, is brief but powerful, and the end leaves us with “no before, no after / the infinite composing,” and those lines move us beyond regret for time lost and into the eternal. We see photos again in “Feed Me” in a stanza that gives us the idea, “No cold silk sheets, no / yellowed photographs, no / sad sighs… can squeeze between / our belly to belly / tongue to tongue / moments of flaming brandy / served in delicate green crystal.” “Feed Me” is one of the longer poems here, and it ends with a blurring of persons. And if “the picture / [that] unfolds under clear green glass” is “me in you in me in / you in me,” then think what having to separate a joined being does to memory and gives it even more power as a relic of the past.

This collection leaves me with, not a sense of regret, but with an expanded notion of place as more than a physical location. I remember “the front porch of old age” and how the body itself houses the many rooms of our individual pasts. The title poem of the book is also the final poem, and a few lines from the last stanza bring the collection together in unexpected ways: “My god / is not this heaving brute of sea, but a quiet / black pearl in the shell of my heart” gives added reverence to all, and when god is mentioned again in the very last line, we know which god this is, the black pearl, and that there is “Too much love in my one stormy life to ever deny god.”

From Mike Puicanpoet and Board President/Guild Literary Complex:

In this daring book of poems, Albert DeGenova takes us on a personal journey through the physical, sensual world, viewed through the lens of desire. His poems, always unfolding in the present moment, vividly describe interactions that range from loving and intimate to misdirected and even destructive. While this is a world in which intimacy and connection can be approached but never fully realized, DeGenova delivers a completely satisfying piece of work. Like the relationship described in the poem “Intimacy Cocktail,” Black Pearl is a “well-blended cocktail of sweat and sex and tears and foibles served over ice.”

From Pamela Miller, author of Miss Unthinkable:

Black Pearl is one of those rare books of poetry that you experience with your whole body, intimate and exhilarating as the music of skin on skin, lips against lips, “fingers/that touch oooh right there.” It’s also heart-wrenching, like a punch in the chest, as this miniature novel in verse spirals down a harrowing journey from happily-ever-after married love to a disastrous extramarital fling and “divorce’s rough-cut hole.” But saxophonist/poet DeGenova refuses to end his tale on a downbeat, opting instead for a bluesy coda of tentative redemption with Mexican jazz, disco and surf music pulsing in the mix. This book is an unforgettable performance that, like your favorite Billie Holiday song, “breathes full and long/and feels, feels, feels.”

$17.00

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