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The poet, writer, and educator Irene Willis has published an intriguing book of poems that derive from or refer to psychoanalysis. Her original intent was to solicit from a variety of poets poems that make explicit reference to Freud. Her purview expanded when she began receiving poetry that did not explicitly mention Freud but that concerned itself with psychoanalysis generally and individual analyses in particular. The results are varied, often quite original, and generally fresh and engaging.
The book takes its title from W. H. Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.” In her introduction Willis quotes the relevant passage:
For one who'd lived among enemies so long:If often he was wrong, and, at times, absurd,To us he is no more a personNow, but a whole climate of opinion
This well-known and well-crafted homage to Freud, the first poem in the book, is followed by Hilda Doolittle's famous poem “The Master,” a lively tribute to her analyst that is in part encomium, in part a peevish scolding for what she experienced as his unrelenting sexism—an accusation, she persuades us, that is not without merit.
These extraordinary poems are followed by two by Anna Freud, one written as a young girl, of lesser power but of biographical and historical interest. I'm puzzled by the inclusion of Anne Carson's “Freud Town,” intended, I take it, to describe the terrors of the unconscious; and I would have chosen Philip Larkin's brilliant “Aubade” or “Sad Steps” over his bellicosely ironic “This Be the Verse.”
Fortunately poems of exquisite poignancy vastly outnumber lesser ones. Lisken Van Pelt Dus's “And These Are My Fears” appears at first