CAPRICORN, VENUS DESCENDANT: 50 Poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros, Poetry by Michael Joyce

Publication Date: May 1, 2022

Paperback, 64 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-08-0

$22.50 retail, $18.00 from publisher

In the poem “Serpentine” from his new collection Capricorn, Venus Descendant, Michael Joyce describes himself “Caught in his own cleverness,” tumbling through “too damn many words for what’s /something everybody knows”—but he’s kidding, really, for surely no one is more in love with words than Joyce, or more skillful at teasing us with them. Consider his subtitle: we readily recognize eros, of course, and these days are grown too familiar with pandemos – but karkinos sends us to the dictionary, yielding an awareness of how these poems arise from confrontation with mortality, from a personal crisis wrapped in a global one. There are moments of “profound despair” here, of frailty and failing flesh; but they are redeemed by long-familiar and cherished intimacy, “what / love is ever even under present circumstance,” and that circumstance affords space for joy and mirth, sacred and profane entwining in wickedly delightful ways. These are mature poems in every sense of the word, and contain – like the dream that the “she” at the center of the poet’s life has at one point – “everything.”

Praise for Michael Joyce & Capricorn, Venus Descendant

What I especially admire about Capricorn, Venus Descendant is how rich a fusion Joyce has achieved between intellectual heft (the dynamic presence of a restlessly and continuously thinking mind), intensity of observation of the natural world, and a vocabulary muscular enough to comprehend both. In poem after poem, the poet is available to a remarkable spectrum of objects and facts, as well as natural, personal and impersonal presences, all marking what he calls the “pure volume” of the many-angled ordinary and extraordinary world, “seen”—as he says—"in passing,” but always lingered over to the point of revelation. Whether his subject is psychological or sexual-amorous, elegiac or celebratory, personal or familial, descriptive or contemplative, the poet seems always “in love with what gives way,” always alert to the workings of the world, all deeply tuned and textured by his keen knowledge of the workings of the language itself. After a reader has walked into these poems he or she will emerge in possession of a great body of objective contents as well as a deeply honest subjective self-portrait. In this, his richest collection so far (packed from its emblematic, enigmatic title with a great many submerged allusions both classical and contemporary) Joyce reveals not only a beating heart but—like Magus Prospero—a “beating mind,” not to mention the “teeming brain” of young John Keats. Read and see.

—Eamon Grennan, author of Plainchant

In Capricorn, Venus Descendant, Michael Joyce rushes over forms with an eagerness to capture and release them. They slip through his hands. The remarkable animation of his language doesn’t interfere with their determination to get to the nub of emotion. I enjoyed the intimacy of these poems as much as I did their energy. Constrained on the page by horizontal and vertical rectangles, the poems catalogue the relations of a “he” and “she” as separate plots, histories, and literary figures. “There must be a word for such longing,” one speaker says, while showing just how many there are.

—Jean Kane, author of Make Me

Let these tender poems take you “along horizons,” where the meeting places of memory and forgetting, love and ego, myth and intimacy are drawn in closely. Michael Joyce’s brilliant collection curves into tensions, where each line urges the next, pulling his reader toward the salty fresh cross-currents of estuaries. You will not navigate alone, however. Capricorn, Venus Descendant leaves signposts everywhere, marking its leafy path – an insistence that poetry indexes all of our ways of speaking.

—Molly McGlennen, author of Our Bearings

With its astrological title and classical allusiveness, this collection functions as a horoscope for love, with all the ancient intricacies that emerge when Venus is the ruling sign, where the poet and his lover run the gamut—if not the gantlet—from sensual passion to spiritual intensity, “seeking the light at the center.” What moves as a lengthening shadow behind these poems, and affords them such force, is what gives love so much its life: death—“the mother of beauty.” By turns heartening and heartrending, tender and tough-minded, these poems make a stellar constellation all their own.

—Paul Kane, author of A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina

About the Author

MICHAEL JOYCE’s seventeen books and several digital works span a career as novelist, poet, critic, theorist, digital literature pioneer, and multimedia artist. He lives along the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie where he is Professor Emeritus of English and Media Studies at Vassar College.

Even before the pandemic, he says he began to think of himself as “an everyday monk, reluctant to frame this stage of my life in terms of what I am going to do, or how I feel, or in any other way that has ‘now’ as an antecedent. That is, I resist thinking it an end or beginning of something, but rather as a continual folding and unfolding along a dimensionless surface, not something but not nothingness.”

For more information, visit michaeljoyce.com.