I Cry Love! Love! Love! by Randel McCraw Helms

Author: Randel McCraw Helms. Review by Joanna Dales

Drawing its title from William Blake’s hymn of praise to sexual love (Visions of the Daughters of Albion), this little book inscribes the word ‘love’ in twenty-two of its thirty-three poems. They celebrate the delights of being in the body, and every kind of sexual and sensual pleasure. The mood is rather that of Lady Chatterley, where the bliss of mutual gratification is all the heaven we need.

Randel McCraw Helms’ poems are not only about sex. Other kinds of love – of God, of friends, of animals, of one’s parents, of one’s children, of creation, even a fragrant sprig of mint or tingling beaker of buttermilk – all are to be savoured. ‘The Glutton’s Song of Love’ glories in the satisfactions of the belly, and poems too are delicious food: ‘Mouth these verses’, Helms bids, ‘mumble them, suck their juice.’ 

Not all the poems are joyful. Sex can play mean tricks, as in ‘Revelation aboard a School Bus, Seventh Grade’. For me the most poignant of the poems is ‘Found Written in the deck of a Capsized dinghy, near Lesbos, Summer 2017’. It is short enough to quote in full:

My name is Ali
My son’s name is Muhammad
If you see my wife, whose name
Is Fatima, tell her I

The title offers an ironic, unspoken contrast with the other famous aspect of the isle of Lesbos, celebrated in explicitly sensual poems like, ‘Sappho Rejoices in the Fragrance of her Beloved Anactoria’. Another poem, ‘The Little Deaths’, shows how the act of sex prefigures the larger death, while ‘Death comes for St Francis’ represents death as the ultimate lover. This poem follows ‘The Shearing of Clare by Francis’, where love is enacted precisely through renunciation of the body.

Helms is far-ranging in his borrowings and allusions – from the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po through Garcia Lorca to Richard Dawkins. A number of the poems draw on the Bible, from the less-than-edifying story of Judah and Tamar to Jesus’ feeding of the multitude. There is nothing snide or irreverent in these references: religion is also part of the glorious endowment of human life, to be savoured in its fullness: ‘We’re [the gene’s] highway, our bodies the bus / to the generation replacing us… This is how our souls survive: It’s DNA that stays alive.’ Dawkins’ theory of the ‘selfish gene’ is embraced in such a way as not to diminish the sacred aspects of life, even though resurrection or immortality of the soul is rejected.

Helms makes complex ideas accessible, in everyday language, accommodated in rhyming lines and jaunty rhythms. His poems enhance and deepen pleasures both intellectual and sensual. As he tells us in ‘What’s the Point of Love Poetry?’: ‘Their sharp smack vivifies.’ Read them: they will enrich your life in all its aspects.

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