Bøger af David Appelbaum

THE SHOCK of LOVE is a book about spirit. It is a book within a book. The book found within is a manuscript entitled THE SHOCK of LOVE. It is purportedly written by Paolo Cellini, Professor of Romance Languages and a student of the era of the troubadours and courtly love. Based on the idea of a book of the heart, current during that time, it is divided into nine chapters that give allegorical detail of the journey of love, a love that completes the spirit in a person. There the reader follows the courtship, the 'alchemical' marriage, and the dark gestation before emerging transformed and completed. The outer book, the book that encloses the found manuscript, tells the story of Cellini as well as speculating on why it came to be written.

This is a book of poems to remember those for whom 'time had lapsed.' The poems begin innocently with common collections, rocks or coins, and progressively, become memories that gather the death in the folds of language, to commemorate the passage. The words are most forceful for those closest to the heart of the narrator. The poems mourn a secret bond with each lost one. In the work of grief, special harmonies in poetry open the soul to the transcendent joy of simply being.

Portuguese Sailor Boy is a fragmentary history of the bloodline of the Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gamma. The bloodline motif plays out in a series of scenes of an unnamed contemporary relation-in symbolic forms like nautical maps and paint-by-numbers frigates. The narrative centers on the wayfaring of his character, which reveals a life of accidental achievement as well as unadvertised follies, and neither ascends nor descends to an end.