Pleasure

Teare’s Pleasure is a fascinating example of what happens when a poet who doubts language’s ability to represent experience, and rejects all codified systems of consolation, desperately needs to represent and make sense of his grief. There are here both aridly objectivist poems which seek to theorize mourning, and vividly lyrical poems which seek to mourn. The pleasure in Pleasure comes from its friction.

It all culminates here, where Teare finds not only the language for grief but the language for what the whole book alludes to and what he himself calls the spectacular disaster of the actual.

In this collection, the elegy as an idea is as much at stake as the lover in memoriam—in fact, it would seem that Teare has managed, through sublimation, to combine the passed lover with Elegy itself.