N A T A L I E E I L B E R T, writing for The Rumpus:
In The Gnostic Religion, German philosopher Hans Jonas writes of a world we have been instructed not to acknowledge. Counter to the Judeo-Christian image of an all-powerful, observing God, the God of Gnostic texts is enslaved; we humans the passage to His eventual release. Jonas calls the Gnostic gospels a “transcendental drama,” and the gnostic world a “cosmic prison.” At the heart of Gnosticism is the seeking of knowledge which would release us of our cosmic imprisonment. But this is a Cartesian trick, of course. To attain such degrees of sight, we’d have to live to our very limits, and treat life the way a scholar treats an endless archive—with the hope that the archives survive us and the transference of knowledge continues.
Enter the lyric. Brian Teare’s Pleasure returns us to the question of what a line can do in the face of death—what, in a world where language has been given over to zeitgeist, fear, and diffuse (140-character limited) application. What can the lyric do for loss that loss hasn’t already done? Teare writes his passed lover back into a strange existence. The lover resurfaces with unabashed sexual energy; and as Adam, maker of names. What happens in this quantum space is a dialogue that can only be signified by the elegy. . .
[ R E A D M O R E ]
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R I G O B E R T O G O N Z Á L E Z, writing for Critical Mass:
There’s a fine line between inhabiting Eden and becoming an exile of Eden, between pleasure and pain–the “luciferous kiss” of touch and neglect. Teare’s elegies are elegant and startling, they almost make me forget the grief that inspires them: “When I write butterfly, it’s not ironic. It’s a sweet name for a needle.”
[ L I N K ]
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M I C H A E L K L E I N, writing for Lambda Literary:
The poems that Brian Teare writes always seem restless with language itself: the words to say what as much as not being able to find the words at all; poems that exist, in a way, between language and utterance that makes them strangely formal—although I wouldn’t call him a formalist, strictly speaking.
His newest book, simply and ambiguously called Pleasure, reveals a world in which grief and remembrance have made the world pastoral but difficult and, at times, like Brenda Hillman’s “Death Tractates” (a book of poems based, in part, on the Gnostic gospels which literally interrupted another book she was writing), practically occult.
This is meant as high praise for a collection where the laser sharp focus falls authoritatively on the matters of the spirit and the flesh in a place called Eden which is also, like every contemporary Eden, a state of mind. . .
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R U S T Y M O R R I S O N, writing for Ron Slate’s On the Seawall:
. . . Brian Teare’s Pleasure is an elegy, but what has been lost, what has been annihilated, is not only the beloved taken by death, but also the speaker’s blindness to the denial that allowed him to live without the awareness, in every moment, of death. Teare faces the facelessness that is our truest madness. At the crux of this crisis, where the Eden of the old symbolic order has failed him, the speaker has found an uncanny, death-evoking sensuality. As Teare tells us in “Dreamt Dead Eden,” “grief breeds meaning / until the small utopias fall … Husband, nothing has touched me like this.” A deepening awareness of death, paradoxically, offers visceral sensation that draws the speaker deeper into the truth and away from the norm of benumbed experience. After the death of the beloved, the “Adam” of his lost Eden, the speaker is no longer able to use the lyric to consort with infinity in the ways that he had in the past. His previous methods of seeking, and of trusting in the validity of seeking solace in the symbolic, have been destroyed. Yet he is cannily aware of his need to return to that denial, to hide in it: “the door warps and on the hottest days / won’t let me out of the lyric, which can’t keep anything / alive.” He writes, even as he elegizes the writing’s lost potency; he suffers the obsessive hold of denial, even as he exposes it as denial. As he speaks to his lost lover, the Adam of his lost Eden, who was the speaker’s first lover: “I author this Eden // to keep you near. Understand? Outside, the real garden / withers too.”
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M I K E P U I C A N, writing for Triquarterly Online:
Brian Teare’s Pleasure begins with an odd fourteen-line prose poem, “Dead House Sonnet,” in which a house has been stripped, burnt, gouged, and taken over by the outside world. The house is a metaphor for language, and especially the act of writing, which continually fails to bear up under the weight of the actual world: “house of each phrase . . . undone verbs . . . burnt tense . . . gouge of form, form of the firmament fallen.”
However, the poem’s final two words introduce another, more original idea: after so much description of the house’s deterioration, the poem suddenly shifts focus and ends with “then sirens.” The poem doesn’t just bemoan the futility of language; it declares that something else, perhaps some other form of expression, can rise beyond language’s shortcomings. Locating that new expression is the ambition of this exciting new book. . .
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D E A N C. R O B E R T S O N, writing for the California Journal of Poetics:
Much like his second collection of poems, Sight Map, Brian Teare’s third collection of poetry,Pleasure, is an exploration of landscapes. Rather than a pastoral inquiry into the nature of the erotic, the beloved, doubt and faith, however, Pleasure concerns itself with a thorny Garden of Eden (“a graveyard garden schemata”). Teare’s Eden is one marked by the death and pain of a body infected with the recent historical consequences of the AIDS epidemic and the intensely intimate suffering it has caused. The title of the collection is striking because, as the content of the book makes all too clear, sex, for all the pleasure it provides, can lead to the ultimate punishment: death. The book is an elegy and a dialogue containing cut-ups and collages; many poems refuse to distance the “I” from impersonal and universal lyricism as the book is about Teare losing his partner to AIDS. Through the fallible nature of language and form, Teare explores the destruction of the beloved in a fleeting and terrifying material world “where flesh, untenable, suffers” against the will of the lover. . .
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L E E S H A R K E Y, writing for Beloit Poetry Journal:
The deeply moving poems in Pleasure eulogize the lover Teare lost to AIDS in 1999 while they engage in—to quote the author in “An Extended Bio” (Ahsahta website)—“a dialectic between autobiography and the languaged page.” In their search to stay grief, they confront, parse, rail against, and indict death and dying as framed by a par- ticular juncture in contemporary American history. The rub of lyric form against the cruel indignities of the lover’s dying generates a volatile verbal energy that has for me no contemporary equal. Teare writes of growing up with the prosody of the King James Bible and a Southern speech that “gave the vowel pride of place.” Hopkins, among others, has added muscle to his consonants. His words proliferate, self-aware, material in their sensuality, encountered, like Stein’s, on the cusp between sound and meaning. . .
[ R E A D M O R E ]
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S U S A N S E T T L E M Y R E W I L L I A M S, writing for Blackbird:
. . . Gnosticism, like certain other mystical traditions, sought to suggest, if not express, the inexpressible by way of paradox, a technique that Teare himself has often employed in his exploration of conjunctions of the spiritual and the sexual. Even the title of this book-length elegy for a lover dead of AIDS hints at paradox to come: Physical pleasure in this context obviously contains the roots of pain; “tell me,” Teare asks, “is pain the garden’s only plan?” But the word pleasure itself, literally, etymologically, is also “Eden’s root.” Eden and its later metamorphosis into Paradise, which means, not pleasure, but “a closed garden,” forms the central conceit of the book, a hinge on which the poems turn. Images of shutting in and shutting out, covering and uncovering abound (an epigraph notes that apocalypsis means “to uncover, disclose”). . .
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