'In its focus on sexual love in its many forms, carnal knowledge celebrates the spirituality of life and the physicality of afterlife. Our urge for intimacy transcends the boundary between what we know and what we imagine. 'We are our meaning's metaphor,' Manfred Jurgensen says. His twelfth poetry collection takes us beyond protocol to the headwaters of desire.
for in these moments
what could be more real
than losing all the sense that could not
be,
letting me bear the agony I feel
in flagrant sufferings of
ecstasy?
Jurgensen takes us on a
dizzying journey around the contours of desire in its many colours and phases -
as lust and love, as fever and fantasy, as the cravings of the body and the
longings of the soul. In poems that are poised and lucid, rich in thought and
vivid in imagery, he grapples with the meanings of that ineffable, ever-elusive
moment when it seems possible to glimpse a knowledge otherwise forbidden us,
'where bodies are the signs of the imagined and the real'. These are poems that
engage the senses, challenge the intellect and fire the imagination. They
explore the mystery of what we are and our perpetual quest for communion - for
in the end, "who am i if not you?"'
Alex Skovron
carnal knowledge,
theme and variations,
Interactive
Press,
Carindale 2000
circus
staking its claim on the
common
our acrobatic make-believe,
lion, monkey, man and woman,
the
high trapeze, adam and eve
together riding the big top,
free-falling
lovers with a burst,
the magic dance that cannot stop -
do you remember
when we first
directed its compulsive dare,
depending on each other's
call,
the tinsel triumph of a pair
half human and half animal?
it was the beauty of the
flight
which left all others lost for words,
the glamour costumes and the
sight
of moving through the air like birds
that made it look so light and
free.
our hearts belonged and have remained
part of their sawdust
family.
but now our leotard skin is stained
from falls and cuts and
missing swings;
our smiles are made up as our name
and when we climb back
through the rings
our timing never is the same.