John Poch’s new book of poems, The Future of Love, is so full of riches that I can’t possibly do them all justice in this post. So I’m going to focus on three of the book’s main motifs: Spain, colors, and love.

Poch has clearly spent considerable time in Spain. It’s referred to or is even the setting for over fourteen of the book’s poems. Brief references include “I crave you the way the Spanish love the olive tree” (in “No Disillusion”) and “the tangle / of narrow streets of Santa Cruz has me lost again” (in “The Thread”). But mostly there are whole poems set in Granada or Almería or Catalunya or Sevilla.

Especially Sevilla.

What has come to Sevilla but your shoulder’s absence
against my chest and a strand of your hair on my sleeve.
Precise is the diamond assault of night on my walk
on the edge of the city where I stand for thresholds. (from “The Razor”)

For the sake of the singing, my name, and
an attempt at understanding white, I have come
to the orange blossom streets of the virgin
of the good air among the nonsense of dying. (from “Santa María la Blanca: Sevilla”)

And the book’s longest poem (three pages) is called simply “Sevilla.” It includes delightful images like these:

Still, these buildings anchor history to air. Look
across town. A bullfight escalates into white hankies.…

                          Build a museum
on millstones, and curate anchors and tile.

For art has become an advertisement for art
hung from a black cathedral, a scrim like a nighty
for the third largest church in the world
whose pillars weigh so much they are sinking

into the earth, like we all do.

I want to end my comments on Poch’s Spain motif with a poem that transitions us to his motif of colors. So here are the opening lines of “Song of Catalunya”:

A flag of scarlet saffron strands bleeds gold
into paella. Years of olive oil have seasoned
this pan the patina of any old gold altar
in a poor church. But outside, the blue-green
sea salt thirst breaks patiently mountains
to stone to sand, and anyone sane wants
to start a shell and sea glass jewelry shop.
Here’s a gin-blue whale, and there’s
a heart of cobalt. A parrot-green parrot
and a beer-brown J so thin and wet it’s orange.

Scarlet, gold, blue-green, gin-blue, cobalt, parrot-green, beer-brown, orange: these are remarkably color-full lines. Reading back through the whole book, I count thirteen “orange”s, twelve “green”s, eight “pink”s, seven “blue”s, six “brown”s and five “yellow”s—as in, for example,

Where we can find the pretty, preserved
in olive oil, we can find the winter light
of Andalucía, silver and green
come through a window to white and blue. (“The Pretty”)

The injured, pitted, pigeon-stained,
diesel-exhausted granite of the gothic cathedral’s exterior
soaks up the shadows, yet
the pinks of granite warming early morning,
the pinks in the flower bed,
the pinks of the wings of her illusion,
and the pinks of the dead pigeon
in the plaza of triumph blush. (“La Giganta”)

You govern color, the fuchsia bougainvillea,
the pink, the orange of dying fire all hung over
my morning walk like new dresses teasing
the ravishing girls to give up their studies and run.…
Here, brown skeins of seaweed wait in the wind
like the hair of the saddest waitress in Andalucía. (“Entre Dos Aguas”)

But Poch’s favorite color by far is white. I count twenty-eight “white”s in these poems—including this one, quoted above, from “Santa María la Blanca: Sevilla”:

For the sake of the singing, my name, and
an attempt at understanding white, I have come
to the orange blossom streets of the virgin
of the good air among the nonsense of dying.

And this, also quoted above, from “Sevilla”:

A bullfight escalates into white hankies.

Here are some more of Poch’s whites:

The people want an ear and ears, if possible,
and then they want the weight of death in white
on a chalkboard. (“Sevilla”)

At first, the old man walking below our terrace
with a box the size of himself seems a nobody.
But paint him white and he’s a priest of Badalona
come to bless us. (“Passeig de Gracia”)

And my final “white” example (the most unusual, considering the noun it modifies), which brings us to Poch’s motif of “love”:

If love is a walled garden, then in time, sooner
than you think, I am one flower outside climbing
to tear it down with a high, white hello… (“Santa María la Blanca: Sevilla”)

Of course, with the book’s title being The Future of Love, we’d expect the word “love” to make some appearances in the poems. But thirty-five appearances? It’s hard for me to know where to begin giving you a sense of the varieties of Poch’s “love.”

Why not start with the book’s title poem? It begins with fun word-play on the word “turn,” then moves into two verbal “love”s:

Our bodies
turn us on,
turn on us

like Turner’s
skies from seas
turn over

until waves
go whitecap.
Disaster

loves the past
while few love
the future

except for
the dying
who believe

the present
hurting will
un-harden,…

Then after several more stanzas the poem ends with a delightfully imaged setting for love-making:

and your eyes
which look through
me, see, say:

Let’s make love
under an
old black grand

piano
otherwise
known as night.

Interestingly, there’s not much more “making love” in these poems. Instead, “love” as a noun plays various other roles. There’s

“his news of a lost love lost” (in “The Thread”)

“From your subtle face, the one I come back to, comes
the breath of love” (in “The Razor”)

“For now, in the shadow of the bridge to Triana,
where no one has ever pledged love, pledge love.” (in “Sevilla”)

“The jade of the daffodil the day before it blossoms
is the yellow for love.” (in “Grace”)

And this passage from “The Plaza of Good Success,” which joins both noun and verb “love” in wonderfully startling images:

“…the memory of your voice fills my hair with metal filings,
and each church I pass is a magnet that loves arches.
When I defend my love, your voice sleeps in my ear
like the translucent egg of a wasp.”

Poch’s verbal “love”s play a range of functions. Here are a few that refer to or take place in Spain—to bring us full circle back to his “Spain” motif, beginning with one that I quoted there, from the poem “No Disillusion”:

“I crave you the way the Spanish love
the olive tree.”

Then from “Sevilla”:

“Your spine presides over the ministry of air,
and I love your police."

And from “Flamenco”:

“I’ll guess and watch
your tendency to strum with your thumb
held on the top string holding that chord you love
that always makes wide gray water appear…`’

Ah, “gray water”: there’s our motif of colors. And the title “Flamenco” sets us in Spain. I do love (oops, let’s say enjoy) the way these three motifs mutually intertwine in so much of The Future of Love.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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