Diary of Desire

Betsy Nuse, the former owner of Boudicca Books, is a Vancouver poet,
writer, and editor.

Described by the publisher as a twelve-section long poem, Diary of Desire is a collection of short pieces presented in larger groupings named for the twelve months of the year. The pieces describe many stages of different love relationships — marriage, commuting to visit a lover, an “eternal triangle” — and emotional states ranging from the euphoria of a sexual encounter to bitter anger over betrayal. Like a real diary, the book does not chart a smooth or simple course between these points but jumps with the speaker’s moods and situations. The general movement of the work, however, is through longing, fulfillment, and rejection towards “Reconciliation,” the title of the final poem.

Fitzgerald is an experienced poet with a good command of technique. Some pieces (“Railroad Romance,” “You Wanted a Poem?”, “The Margaret Truman Drop-off Launderette”) rely on cleverly-executed “standard” poetic techniques: spinning out and bending metaphors, playing with puns and multiple meanings. But most of the pieces are less penetrable collages of experience, word association, literary and real-life allusions which flower more fully under study and analysis than casual reading. A careful reader can pick out interesting subject threads in this complex tapestry: baseball, music (blues, country, classical), hard science. The weaving of such contrasting elements with one of the oldest themes of poetry — love, or in Fitzgerald’s own words, “the old dreams” —locates Diary of Desire squarely with the work of other contemporary language-conscious intellectual poets.