Faber Book of Blue Verse, the thing you'll like best

A little bit ago nineveh_uk posted about The Faber Book of Blue Verse, and I liked the poems she posted so much I went and got myself a copy.

I found it an odd read. It's not a collection of erotic verse - the blurb calls it "candidly sexual literature", and says that the collection features work which "demonstrated humankind's touching, tender, ribald, coarde and technically adept explorations of that perennially fascinating subject - sex".

There are a couple of poems I really liked, and lots that made me laugh. Some I found very jarring though. There are quite a few poems that are about rape, some overtly ('Rape' by Tom Pickard), some less so. The collection opens with 'Eskimo Nell', which I didn't know, and which has a man shoot a woman through the vagina in an attempt to kill her. I was feeling pretty angry about this, because I felt that a collection that purported to be about sex ought to be about consensual acts rather than sexual violence. Thinking about it though, I think that as its not erotic, it's more blurred and perhaps should include a broader collection of experiences than I first thought.

Then I realised that this thing that bothers me is that it's all one sided. There are only poems about the experiences of rapists - there is nothing comparable about the experience of women, or men, who have been raped or sexually assaulted. So "blue", which implies something playful, something designed to offend people but make other people laugh, can encompass the experiences of being the one who assaults, but the experiences of those who are assaulted are not admitted, as this might undermine the whole thing. Ugh. I'm not explaining this very well, it went much better when I was thinking about it in bed. I should never have got up.

The closet the collection comes is ( 'the thing you'll like best' by Zoë Fairbairns )

I really, really like that.

I also liked Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's response to Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing-Room, which is The Reasons That Induced Dr Swift to Write a Poem Called 'The Lady's Dressing-Room', which ends:

'She answered short, I'm glad you'll write.
You'll furnish paper when I shite.'