Poem Of The Week: Valentine By Amy Key

Amy Key has the estimable knack of approaching her subjects by circuitous means, in terms that are associative but blisteringly on-point. Like a nominal aphasiac who has a capacity for chasing down nouns with adjectival brilliance, Key is hugely skilled at employing words that speak to the emotions in ways that are both counter-intuitive and redolent of mood.

And typically, she is ‘all in’. The gorgeous embellishments of Valentine are of a piece with the unrestrained mood of the poem, for its narrator’s feelings are neither circumscribed by, nor cognizant of, any scintilla of formal propriety. Bursting out of the two quatrains like an access of love, the narrator’s body and mind are in hock to the endorphins of infatuation. The immediacy of Key’s language, of her inventory of symbols and tokens that skate effortlessly round meaning and persuade with an ear-to-ear grin, is a joy to behold.

Unconditional praise for the ripeness of the human form and its easeful conflation with the morning's enchantments – the curves, the plumpness, the heroic indifference to anything outside of the moment – is intuitively reciprocal; the ‘heart wheels’ and the saucer of emotion froths over in defiance of the quotidian ‘legacy of teacups’, or the self-conscious artifice of sheets. That the narrator’s ‘platelets coo’ is a manifestation of that totality, of the abandonment of the mind, and now the blood and viscera, to the loved object. And if the nexus is to be as fleeting as a fart under a blanket, it is worth reflecting that its beauty is contingent upon that very transience.

‘Valentine’ is taken from Luxe and is published by Salt (2013). The poem is reproduced here with the kind permission of Amy Key.
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