Black Valentine

Poetry. This lovely addition to Chax Press’ line of chapbooks features Portland poet David Abel’s elegiac sequence on love and grief. Written in New York following the 1988 death of Robert Duncan but published in 2006, Abel’s poem takes as its point of departure a line from Christopher Marlowe, who writes Black is the beauty of the brightest day. From this ambiguous, mournful line, Abel fashions a beautifully spare set of poems that encompass and intertwine concerns both philosophical and quotidian, displaying both sadness and acceptance in the face of death. As he writes, My heart climbs/like a fish, dumb/and I swallow stones: /love’s incomprehension/smoothed by/water. David Abel, co-curator of the Spare Room reading series, is a poet, editor, bookseller, raga singer, and poker player who moved to Portland in 1997 after stints in New York and Albuquerque