is My friend and poet Professor P. Raja has gifted me an autographed copy of the first edition of Love Poems of Elizabeth Sargent. 

The poet herself has signed the copy as “This copy to an unknown friend, October 14, 1966.” Only a bibliophile can understand the value of a first edition and a signed copy by the author.

Elizabeth Sargent (1920 - 1917) was a poet, artist, and composer who lived and worked in New York City. In 1963, she published her first book of poetry, African Boy. Her other works are A Woman in Love, and The Magic Book of Love Exercises. 

Elizabeth Sargent's writing is hypnotic and this is my view. This I can say because I’ve read all her books. Unconventional, erotic, and transgressive, her poems immediately attract. 

Although she is very careless while putting her thoughts on paper and certainly doesn’t have any finely-honed literary technique but the poems are very powerful indeed in their own way. 

She has written some of the very thought-provoking poems but critics have compartmentalized her as an erotic poet. 

The title of this article is taken from the section of her long poem “A Season in Paradise” which is a kind of masterpiece. The unconventional technique and form and the words chosen to convey certain feelings, all are new, unparalleled in fact.

Read one poem – “A Sailor at Midnight” – which I have purposely selected here because this is the poem which became her Achilles heel.
 
 A sailor at midnight came ashore
 You know what he came looking for
 But he found me instead
 And he followed where I led. 
 
I took him home through dark streets, glad
 To have him. I took him home to bed. 
 He had kisses, it seems, in store
 For man, woman or whore
 And soft caresses and stories
 Of wrecks and dead men and many more
 Things I liked; it wasn’t so much what he said 
 As how he said it – “Dead men floating all around!” 
 
He cried, and shoved the head
 Of his thing into me (I bled
 A little, he was so large) A sort of dread
 Struck him. “What are you, anyway,” he whispered. 
 “Are you a virgin?”
 “No, I’m a poet,” I said. “Fuck me again.” 

The book I mentioned in the opening sentence is dedicated to her mother and the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891), himself known for his transgressive and surreal themes. 

Rimbaud produced the bulk of his literary output at very early age and completely stopped writing literature at age 20. He died from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday.

Rimbaud has written somewhere about the ‘woman as poet’ - “Woman will discover the unknown. Will her world be different from ours? She will discover strange, unfathomable things, repulsive, delicious. We shall take them, we shall understand them.”

I find, Sargent as a writer, a bit of a mystery. 

And mysteries remain unsolved, forever.