Year of Valentines
Poetry
Art-Rite Publishing Company, 2025
$15.00, 116 pages ISBN: 978-1- 963908-77-0
“Without lies, none of us are beautiful,” John Reed concludes the sonnet “13 Lies,” and while “lies” may put a misleading spin on the observation, the sense that fancy and metaphor, hyperbole and exaggeration and unfettered devotion vivify our amorous attachments is laser-accurate. For as the title of the collection suggests, Year of Valentines is one long love poem from one person to another, though composed of eighty-six short lyrics, all around fourteen lines, the classic length of the quintessential love lyric, the sonnet, even without the Petrarchan or Shakespearean rhyme schemes. Indeed, a kind of surreal Through the Looking Glass atmosphere pervades the poems – love on a grand, galactic scale. The poems are vaguely (often explicitly) located in New York City. “A lie is a live heart, hopping in dust,” Reed assures us.
It’s a paradoxical relationship that he chronicles, which may be said to characterize all epic romances (think Taylor and Burton, Scott and Zelda). Reed captures this sense over and over. Take the poem “Close,” for instance. Close? Try “suffocating.”
Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow,
every morning you’ll be farther away.
Back when we were kids and you shanked me in
the scrotum with a toenail clipper file,
I wouldn’t have believed we’d drift apart.
We really were close, inseparable,
weren’t we?
Sure, there’s the sense of an ending here – albeit an endless one that just keeps on “ending” without ever concluding – but keep that word “inseparable” in focus. “Who would have guessed you and I would stay friends?”
Over and over Reed emphasizes the DNA-like intertwining of the two characters in the poems (nameless; let’s call them “I” and “Thou”). In the three “Dear John” poems – “Author of All,” “John John,” and “Nunjas” – Reed identifies the two as “Elizabeth” and “John,” but these names also feel like puppet appendages, invented for the occasion. The poem “Late” takes place in a car at night, the always-silent love object behind the wheel while the speaker (can’t shut him up!) expresses his endless devotion. It ends:
And you turned the dial on the radio
and forgot my eyeball, still in your heart
(blood and saline) blinking behind your aorta.
What an image! It’s like the vein throbbing in the throat, but even more packed, more cramped. Two souls cannot get much closer that that! Or can they? “Party Tricks” begins:
You really had all the best party tricks.
Like that time you pulled me into a hat.
Nevermind the delight when I climbed out
And what a fantabulous cabinet
of curiosities.
Stuck in a hat, trapped in a box, but in a naughty, mischievous sense, nothing threatening. This sense of playfulness – magicians’ dummies, dolls, the poem called “Cloth Monkey,” puppets on strings – is a theme throughout Year of Valentines. Indeed, the “Puppet House” sequence – “K,” “Queen Mother,” “Heads and Haha,” “Strings on the Sparrows,” “When the Puppet Master,” “After This,” “So So,” and “Hallways” – brilliantly plays on this metaphor. As Reed writes in “When the Puppet Master”:
I remember that we were limb to limb,
and that the master went out for the night,
and that our strings were tied to each other.
It’s an image that reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s line in “Hallelujah”: she tied you to a kitchen chair. The crisscross interlacing of the strings at once conveys both imprisonment and devotion. (Yes, let’s add David and Bathsheba to the list of prototypical lovers whom Reed echoes!)
“Mi Mea (Culpa)” and “Grabby” are poems in which, similarly, the lovers are portrayed in doll images, not unlike puppets on strings. In the latter Reed writes:
we danced so long at the Guggenheim
that we lost our friends, and by accident
went to Vienna, where we turned into
dolls with cloth bodies and porcelain heads
(with expressions that could mean anything)
and were placed on a shelf for a lifetime
staring at each other with repentance...
The lovers are inextricably conjoined. The sonnet “Your Name Was Written All Over Me” expresses this amorous inseparability in yet another way:
We were there on the streetcorner,
standing too close together, or too far apart,
and your name was written all over me,
in fat marker, chisel-up, red and black.
Oh, and all caps. Name, first and last, and times
and dates, and percentages, usually
quite high, like eighty-eight or ninety-four.
By the end of Year of Valentines, the identification of the lovers is so complete that what’s left besides mutual annihilation? Creation and destruction always go hand in hand, like Shiva in Hindu mythology. Thus, the imagery of final 13-line sonnet, “Curtains,” which closes the surreal drama like the end of an exquisite performance, a pas de deux, essentially describes their extinction:
What a marvelous doomsday that was.
Glory be, those good time armageddons
with space capsules and galactic mishaps
and warp travel accidental—“strap in
for a bumpy ride”—by meteor streams
dismade of onerous physical laws,
and good, so good, for destruction.
John Reed’s Year of Valentines is a delight to read for its dazzling imagery, and who isn’t a sucker for a love story?