An Autoerotic History of Swings

Prairie Fire Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2011)

An Auto-Erotic History of Swings
by Patricia Young
Winlaw, BC: Sono Nis Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-55039-178-7, 110 pp., $14.95 paper.

Reviewed by Anna Mioduchowska

Read it below or downlaod a copy here

Alright, so I can’t get a smile off my face while writing this review, but bear with me. I suspect that Havelock Ellis, sexologist, physician and social reformer in Victorian Britain, whose six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex inspired Patricia Young’s latest poetry collection, would have the same reaction. The very capable and much awarded Patricia Young might already have nine poetry
collections and one book of short stories to her name, but the poems in An Auto-Erotic History of
Swings exhibit the fresh-faced vitality of a seventeen-year-old throbbing with lust.

There are so many ways to explore the flesh. Young has chosen to play – with language, with
Ellis, and with our expectations. She is exuberant and funny as she focuses her imagination on the art
of making love, conception, fetishes, masturbation and prostitution, or explores the power of scent
and dreams. Nothing is taboo here, which itself becomes a subject of “Taboo-Girl,” inspired by Ellis’s
comments on sex during menstruation. The poem is a hymn of triumph a young girl sings to herself
in defiance of what her elders are muttering in the background. You’ll like the ending.

Some of the poems are voluptuous canvases. “The Great Peasant Girls,” which reminds me of
Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, depicts a whole village engaged in a great orgy of lovemaking
between the peasant girls and “The clodhopper in wooden clogs. / The boy who sharpened the knives
. . . / The blacksmith’s son . . . / The earl . . . / The idiot boy . . . / Why: // Because our lives were tallow candles. / Because a chunk of stale bread and raw onion. . . . Because hooks / unhooked themselves and light drained from the sky” (24–25). Ellis likens these peasant girls to “ardent . . . mares in heat” (24). Young takes away nothing away from the fun they might be having as she quietly directs our
attention to the other kinds of hunger present.

Ellis’s women are powerfully sensual beings in a world where power rest in the hands of men;
Young’s women engage in subversions. I love her use of hyperbole. In the pungently erotic “Fruiting
Bodies,” Christian asceticism is juxtaposed against the power of desire. “Dear Lord,” prays a
desperate practitioner of abstinence,

. . . let me not love the pungent mornings
she tromps through wet salal, hunting honeycomb

morels at the base of tree trunks . . .
let me not

love her pail of fruiting bodies, or fall on my knees
for the hens of the woods . . .

. . . let me
unlove the wavy-capped one whom I love with a

fecund and overlapping joy. For even a glimpse
of her, muddy-kneed and bearing a sack of peppery

chanterelles, I would crawl though humus and dung
the length of three score and ten worlds. (58–59)

Young does not ignore the dark side, yet she presents it from the perspective of a distant God
watching children play “pa and ma” (18) with the ferocity of adults. Incest is the theme of “Devil
Lover.” In “Conversation,” a nobleman’s lyrical paean to his favourite concubine’s tiny foot is
followed by her matter-of-fact account of how she broke her feet herself as a child because her
mother was dead. I can almost see her shrugging her shoulders as she speaks.

Young uses no fixed form but the poem’s shape invariably enhances the content. Most of the
poems are written in free verse, some march or boogie down the page in tercets or quatrains, some
look like a question and answer form used by a researcher. The delicious title poem is a compilation
of ways women have used swings, a list poem. “Night-Running,” one of my many favourites, is an
excellent example of Young’s ear for rhythm.

The book is divided into three sections. Quotations from Ellis’s work serve as springboards to all
the poems in the first section, and Young reaches across the globe and time for her narrators and
images. In the second, quieter section, we find ourselves mostly in the present. Language changes
markedly to reflect the power shift and today’s rituals of courtship, marriage, sex for fun. Still, even as
women can openly enjoy the flesh, they are subject to the same heartbreaks: unwanted pregnancy,
divorce, and death, with the added environmental problems.

The third section is one long poem, the wistful “In God’s Last Words.” It’s a good example of
how to avoid being preachy while preaching a sermon on the importance of love. Young has God use
boating language to bless and to warn before leaving us. “And I said, Let / there be choice. Let the
choices multiply and fill the earth. / Let sex occur in humble vessels with or without oars, / and let the
oars carved with simple tools (saw, axe, chisel) / feather the coastal waters . . . / Let every gaff-rigged //
ketch sail to and from the green islands . . .”(107) Unrhymed couplets allow even more light and
breathing space on the page.

As in every collection, there are a few poems that don’t quite rise to the occasion, but that does
not affect the quality of the whole. Buy this lovely book. It’s a steal at $14.95. pπ

Anna Mioduchowska’s poems, translations, stories, essays and book reviews have appeared in
anthologies, journals, newspapers, on buses, and have aired on the radio. In-Between Season, a poetry
collection, was published by Rowan Books. Eyeing the Magpie, a collection of poetry and art, was
published in collaboration with four fellow poets.

POETRY: Patricia Young’s poems rich in linguistic foreplay

Review by Jennifer Still in the Winnipeg Free Press

03/26/2011

ACCLAIMED Victoria poet Patricia Young opens her ninth collection, An Auto-Erotic History of Swings (Sono Nis Press, 110 pages, $15) with a poem that introduces the ancient lost erotic texts of Cadmus Milesius, thus beginning a poetic pilgrimage through the histories and prehistories, lived and imagined, of sexual encounter.

Young’s poetic voice, rich in linguistic foreplay, has arrived ripe to its subject. These are poems that hum at the climax, flick the tongue at taboos.

The first half of the book takes its cues from 20th-century British sexologist Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Young’s self-sufficient narratives map the sexual body in union and loneliness, from ecstasy to disappointment, desire to addiction, fertility to rape.

In Brass Eggs, desire is particularly lonely and exquisite: “tonight, lovesick yourself, you think/of those women rocking in rocking chairs, brass leaf balls / vibrating inside their bodies while outside beans climb trellises, / rain falls on rooftops, worlds tumble on.”

An Auto-Erotic History in Poems

Review in Rover Arts by Maxianne Berger

14.02.2011

What Patricia Young found in Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was the wellspring for “The Art of Love,” a remarkable series of poems, each illuminated by an epigraph from Ellis’s writings. His “Most children … are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies” results in her “What We Know About Babies,” which proposes sources from “cow patties” to “dug out of/ the ground along with the potatoes.” In her acknowledgments, Young indicates that “images or phrases drawn from Ellis’s work are occasionally woven into the poems themselves.” The voice is at times a persona (“Moments After My Conception,” “Taboo-Girl,” “Devil Lover”) and at times documentary narrator, presenting themes through various examples. In “A Question of Frequency,” a Hindu physician, the Talmud, Russian priests, a ninth-century monk, and the Archbishop of Canterbury indicate “how often sexual intercourse should take place.”

These intriguing details lead the reader to wonder which are based on Ellis, which on Young’s further research, and which on her imagination. That quibble aside, Young’s attention to diction and form is masterful. In “Portal” the words for navel convey the joy of the poem’s composition: “a glub-nut, pin-/ prick, glob-nob, dung-bun,/ squirt-drop, a whisper soft as …” Similarly, “Night-Running,” about “trial-marriages,” presents “Tarrying,” “handfasting, bundling” and “quested.” As to form, among free verse, couplets, triplets, sextets, Q and A and prose poems, I was particularly drawn to “The Cult of the Bath,” a pantoum bookended by “My love is Tahitian, clean, clean” and “My Tahitian lover, however, is clean, clean.”

“The Art of Love” is followed by “Karita in Love (again)” and “God’s Last Words.” “Karita” uses different voices to muse about her topic. In “Boys,” Young provides the details through which we can often recognize our adolescent selves—”we were doomed/ before we began, hard-wired to want/ even the loudmouth punks/ setting off firecrackers at dawn.” In “Sex: Reasons for Having It,” Young’s list includes such chestnuts as “I felt sorry for him” and “I was flattered” and that wonderfully banal “It was one of those days, a Tuesday, I think.” Most thought-provoking is the parthenogenesis imagined in “Endgame,” where men (“you”) are extinct, and “Every myth bleeds into a memory of you.”

The book’s final section is the sequence “On Sex and Wooden Boats: God’s Last Words.” Faithful to its title, for all the double entendres, the diction and prosody recall the English of the King James Bible: “And fear not, for I shall not smite you for bedding/ down one with the other or for entering into communion// with the one whom you adore. Behold, for I, even I,/ am the breath of the wind that carries your dory up// the Inside Passage and through the misty fjords.”

Poems from An Auto-Erotic History of Swings have appeared in some 15 literary magazines and anthologies, and have been short-listed for nine poetry awards, winning Arc‘s Poem of the Year Contest and Grain‘s prose poem competition. Young’s book as a whole, too, will surely be recognized.

Maxianne Berger is the author of Dismantled Secrets. She has work forthcoming in Brèves littéraires.

Special to Times Colonist, November 28, 2010

Review by Candace Fertile

Any collection of poetry titled An Auto-Erotic History of Swings is setting up some huge expectations, and it’s no surprise that Victoria writer Patricia Young delivers the goods forcefully. Young has published nine volumes of poetry and one of short stories, and she has been awarded numerous prizes. An Auto-Erotic History of Swings combines the serious and the playful to consider the mystery of sex and desire.

The book has three parts: The Art of Love, Karita in Love (again), and God’s Last Words. The title poem is found in the first part and like the others in this section takes a quotation from Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1887-1928) as a starting point. Ellis coined the term “auto-erotic,” and I recall reading his work when I was an undergraduate and being baffled by some of his ideas. But like Freud, Ellis broke new ground, and Young entertains some of Ellis’s thoughts with a zippy imagination. The title poem’s quotation — “during the months when the men in these districts have to be away from home, the girls put up swings” — sends Young around the world in an examination of women and swings:

After swinging, the Crow women of Montana
dreamed voluptuous encounters with the moon
in the shape of a man….

The fluid, sensual movement of a swing both matches and contradicts sexual activity, and Young appears to relish all the possibilities thrown up by the image.

With poems in the first section titled Dildo, Masturbation: Q&A, Portal, Brass Eggs, and A Question of Frequency (among others), readers must be prepared for anything. In particular the worlds of men and women are different, with men being dominant, as Ellis seemed to see them. Women and girls had their sexual power — and men, while powerful, were also subject to female power. In In the 3-D Garden, a bride wears out her husband: “Not even her husband / can fragment her ardour; not even he / can tamp down the too-passionate / bride rising at the mouth / of the garden like a stately blue / lupine committed / to another conceptually loaded sin.”

Young often uses questions and repetition in these poems to splendid effect — a merging of form and content. In the second section, a poem titled Sex: Reasons for Having It, is hilarious in its reality: “I wanted to be plucked like a bug from the grimy windshield of life. / I was lonely.” The “I wanted” and “I was” repetition emphasizes the need and hope of human beings even when they know what is needed will not be given. Young’s poems vary widely in length, but the shortest poem may have the longest title: Over Lunch I Ask Three Friends What Their Mothers Said to Them about Sex. Buy the book for the poem.

The last section is a long poem about God and sex and building a boat, the Noah tale transmogrified into a modern story of choice in love: “Choose freely and with / a full heart whomsoever you choose. And I said, Let / there be choice. Let the choices multiply and fill the earth.”

An Auto-Erotic History of Swings shows an acclaimed poet swinging at the height of her powers, splaying concrete language into deliberate abstractions that open minds to word play and body play. You may find yourself tempted to go to the nearest playground and take a ride on the swings after reading this book.