Testimonials And Reviews 2
Reviewed by Don Taylor
Professor Howard Rice, recently retired from San Francisco Theological
Seminary, in a lecture entitled Keeping Body and Soul Together, lamented that
the churches’ reluctance to speak about erotic love has helped create the multi-billion
dollar pornography industry. If true, then David Bryen’s accomplishment in The Man
Loves the Wine She Serves Through Her Body: An Erotic Encounter With the Divine
Feminine is two fold. First his willingness to open the doors to a spiritual understanding
of Eros, is a welcome drink of water in a barren religious landscape. Second, his poetry
lifts human desire, attraction, longing and pleasure above the titillating thought ultimately,
unsatisfying grip of triple X sex towards a heightened awareness of the divine potential in
human sexual experience.
Like other forms of erotic spiritual poetry one can interpret the words a speaking about
a man’s sacred love for a woman, or the human quest for a deeper divine relationship.
Below are the opening lines to the New Revised Standard Version of The Song of Solomon,
verses 2-4:
Let him kiss me with the kisses of its mouth! For your love is better than wine
Your anointing oils are fragrant. Your name is perfume poured out:
Therefore the maidens love you. Draw me after you, let us make haste.
The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exult and rejoice in you:
We will extol your love more than wine: Rightly do they love you.
Is the King referred to in the poetry above necessarily a human one or could these verses
be interpreted as a mystic’s beginning search for God?
Many of David Bryen’s selections offer the same choice as in the poem She
I’m not sure if it was first your skin
Turned amber by the sun,
Or the liquid stillness
Of your sun browned eyes,
Or the gilded curls on your shoulders
All I know is that some ancient
Well casing opened and I
Plummeted a long way down.
The wine that took me there
Drank me dry,
Drunkened me into ecstasies
That burned my heart into molten flesh.
The taste on my lips stirred longings
Lifetimes old.
Then I started praying to She
Who sent you here.
There is also the divine quest for the human in Bryen’s work. Accordingly, Dawn
of Desire
Some say dawn comes because the earth spins,
Thus darkness is chased every day by light.
These people know the mechanics of things.
But She says:
“I desire to se myself in the birth of the day!
I created Dawn to se my own reflection.
I created Desire in you that I may see
The deep reflection of my own.“
Is reminiscent of Rumi’s The Hunt
The Lover comes, the Lover comes!
Open the way for him!
He’s looking for a heart,
Let’s show him one.
I scream
“What you come to hunt is me!”
He says laughingly,
“I’m here not to hunt you but to save you.”
Many choices like Eyes that Know Lace and Cary Beauty or Under your Skirt ,reminded me
of John Donne’s love poetry, like Witchcraft by a Picture or A fever. On the beat side of the
street, the poem, In My Waiting, recalls Laurence Ferlinghetti’s I Am Waiting.
I recommend this book to anyone willing to help reclaim the divine dimension of erotic love.
Like Thomas Moore’s The Soul of Sex, David Bryen’s poems speak to the mystery and
majesty of Eros, rather than trying to explain or moralize it. Perhaps such literature is not
for the faint of heart, but love, in whatever form it graces our lives, rarely is.
Don Taylor, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church of Newport.
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