Harold Norse, the Love Poems, 1940-1985

Love Poems makes me think of something a sappy high school kid writes. That's definitely not what this is, though, and all the poems aren't even necessarily about love. In the Foreword, Norse says the book "rose from the ashes of its predecessor, Carnivorous Saint." While Carnivorous Saint was subtitled Gay Poems and was full of gay pictures, in The Love Poems he removed all the explicit pictures, removed numerous of the more explicit poems, and expanded the title to be more universal. This book has about 60 pages of poetry from 1976-1985 that were written after Carnivorous Saint. Then about 60 pages of poems were removed from Carnivorous Saint to craft this collection. A few of my favorite poems, which happened to be explicit, were removed: Bastard Angel, The Bedsheet is Stained with Wet Dreams of You, and To a Young Man in Torremolinos. However, there's a picture of a naked man on the cover, and there are still lots of explicit gay poems, so Love Poems was not completely castrated, never fear. All of the poems from The Love Poems are present in the Collected Poems, almost in the exact same order (from pages 302-440). With one possible exception: I haven't been able to find "Watcher in the Sky" in the Collected Poems. Anyone interested in Norse should check out his Collected Poems. From there, if you want a smaller collection, something easier to throw in a backpack, there are several choices: Karma Circuit, Penguin Modern Poets 13, Hotel Nirvana, Carnivorous Saint, and The Love Poems. Each has their own merits.

Although many of the poems are reprinted from "Carnivorous Saint" this is still an essential overview of Norse's poetry. He's an under-rated member of the Beat movement. Much explicit sexual content, gay.