Presence of Love

This collection gathers Coleridge's most tender and aching verses on love, that most treacherous of human experiences. Here is the love that sustains and the love that destroys, the longing that pierces and the presence that consoles. From the feverish desire of 'Youth and Age' to the ghostly consolations of 'Love's Protonotario', these poems trace love's entire arc: its arrival like a thief in the night, its consumption that leaves the lover remade or ruined, its strange persistence beyond loss. Coleridge, that most tortured of the Lake Poets, brings his visionary intensity to the most intimate of subjects. He does not merely write about love; he writes from within it, from its depths and from its ruins. These are poems for anyone who has ever loved and lost, or loved and feared the losing. They ache with the peculiar brightness of something precious precisely because it cannot last.