The Knowing Heart: Love Poetry

David Goicoechea is a professor of philosophy at Brock University in St.
Catharines.

This book’s subtitle is fitting, for those who are not in love, have
not been in love, or do not look forward to being in love will miss the
vibrancy, inspiration, and adoration that characterize each phrase of
this beautiful slim book—a book written by a woman who is in love with
a man and is also very much in love with being in love.

The Knowing Heart fulfills the promise of its title. First, it is a
first-person account of a woman adoring a man, and as Pascal once wrote:
“The heart has its reasons which the mind knows not.” In her state
of adoration each moment and each detail of her love become reverently
and beautifully significant. In her adoration she whispers love letters,
as it were, to her lover about their first kiss and their winter picnic
and his previous loves and her eternal hopes. In her adoration she
discovers the divinity for which she would die in her lover’s love for
her. Her adoration becomes an inspiration, so that in near-breathless
wonder nature abounds in images of her love. Within the cycle of that
nature—the cycle of spring, summer, fall, and winter—her inspired
adoration even becomes a beautiful song of mourning, for our sweetest
songs are those that tell of our saddest thoughts. This adoring,
mournful love song wouldn’t be so sweet without its ever-present
threats of separation and a bonding less than total. But that is all in
the background, for this adoring poetry is vibrantly positive, fresh,
and young. This loving would not perhaps have been without the reading
that prepared for it. And this writing of this love is perhaps in some
way the love’s raison d’кtre. How could such falling in love be,
without that magic elixir that is the poetry of love both before the
love and after the love. This book is made of that magic and is thus the
perfect gift for lovers.