It was my honour to edit Martin Mc Carthy’s The Book of Desire. While working with him, I got to know Martin as a gentleman, a scholar and an exemplary human being, as well as a poet. This is a book of poetry, so that will be my focus. Still, it doesn’t hurt to know that poets don’t have to invariably be oddballs and cretins!

The Book of Desire is not your run-of-the-mill modern poetry book. All too often modern poetry attempts to avoid praise, and love poetry is a form of praise. Hell, desire itself is a form of praise, if we think about it. With desire we find someone else so attractive as to be irresistible. We praise that special someone with our eyes, with our longing looks, with the reactions of our bodies, and if we are poets not overcome by inhibitions, we praise them with our poems as well.

So why do modern poets, almost by consensus, avoid praise? I think it’s akin to schoolchildren being afraid to wear something that will get them ridiculed: bell bottoms too skinny in the sixties or too flared later, for example.

Poems of praise, poems of love and poems of desire should not be treated like fashion trends, but somehow that’s what happened. Modern poets concluded that things like sentiment, emotionalism and praise were ‘bad’ and would get them ridiculed by their peers, so they copped out.  Not all poets, but the majority.

And yet we human beings are sentimental creatures, we’re emotional creatures, and we like to praise and be praised. Is any of that bad?

I consider myself an exception to the modern poetic rule. Both my published books are books of love poems. One editor told me that she considered me the best contemporary writer of love poems. Another editor modified my bio to say my poems ‘burned on the page’. More than a few readers have said similar things over the years. But, alas, I now have competition in a certain Martin Mc Carthy! But I do have a head start on him, so hopefully it will be like the tortoise and the hare. In any case, the two of us are in a smallish minority, writing poems about love and desire in the 21^st century.

I find Martin’s poetry unique and refreshing for the following reasons:

First, love poetry requires honesty that goes beyond mere flattery. What I see immediately in ‘Nymph’, the The Book of Desire’s opening poem, is such honesty when Martin admits that he’s like a moth drawn to flame, powerless to resist. Just the sight of a girl’s bare arms is enough to incite desire.

Second, poets have to be able to communicate both what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling. That’s far easier said than done, or all the world’s bad and mediocre poets would be great. A poet needs the gift of words, and we see that in the book’s second poem, ‘The Sea Beats in You’. It is here that Martin reveals himself as a mystic. Some of my favourite poets were mystics: William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Rumi, Sappho, Walt Whitman. The mystics see connections between themselves and the universe that ‘normal’ people don’t. In this splendid poem Martin, his lover, the sea and the moon are all connected, all part of something larger and endlessly mysterious.

I also like the continuity of Martin’s poems in The Book of Desire. The idea of what might be called ‘interconnections within vastness’ is a recurring theme. In many modern poetry collections we have one disconnected idea after another. But here we have poems building toward T. S. Eliot’s ‘overwhelming question’. What are the roles of love and desire in the universe we occupy, so temporarily?

Of course there is no absolute answer. But Martin shows us how it is possible to navigate the ebbing and flowing waters of desire while embracing the Great Mysteries that surround us.

I could go on, because there is so much to like and recommend, but I don’t want to delay you from reading the poems any longer! The Book of Desire is a book well worth diving into.