Leo Schulz

Allegorical Beasts Leo Schulz

Wrought with sex - abusive, loving, distressing, bewitching... .

Allegorical Beasts is a collection of poems and stories written over a 30 year period. There are five sections. The first is Sonnets from the Sea, a cycle of 45 sonnets written in Auckland, New Zealand in the early 1980s. They are lyrical, playful, direct, sensual - the poems of a young man tossing in his bed, anxious for a lover, looking for friends, compelled by the wild seas of the Auckland coastline.

The second, An Imitation of Dante, is set on a rainy night and morning on Piccadilly Circus. It climbs through the Inferno of loneliness and rejection, the Purgatorio of redemption in friendship to the Paradiso of sexual-romantic love.

The Devil Writes to a Woman Who Loves Him, the third section, is a short poem about consensual abuse in a sexual relationship. The fourth, City of Solitude, is the story of a very young writer struggling with words, imagery, identity, disorientation in London at its coldest and most alienating.

The final section, Love: a Confession, is an extended meditation on the calamity of love broken and discarded. It is harsh, grievous, ruthless - an exact, inch by inch recounting of sexual love spiralling down through betrayal, guilt and deceit to rage and hate... and at last, if only in part, to forgiveness... .