Review of Climate of Opinion edited by Irene Willis Reviewed by Dante Di Stefano in The Best American Poetry

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Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry
Ed. Irene Willis IP Books, 2017 Review by Dante Di Stefano in The Best American Poetry 2019.

Irene Willis has curated a lively and compelling anthology of poetic engagements with Freud and his complicated psychoanalytic and cultural legacies. The anthology begins with the elegy by W.H. Auden, “For Sigmund Freud,” which ends:

Our rational voice is dumb; over a grave
The household of impulse mourns one dearly loved:
Sad in Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

David Lehman’s “Freud Quiz” concludes the volume on a buoyant and anodyne note. Between Auden and Lehman, Willis anthologizes poems by H.D., Anna Freud, Anne Carson, Dorothy Parker, Alicia Ostriker, Toi Derricotte, Stephen Dobyns, Lynn Emanuel, Louise Glück, Anne Sexton, David Giannini, and many more. Some of the highlights of the anthology come from lesser known poets, such as Vasiliki Katsarou, whose poem, “Terrarium,” reads in full:

Once
she thought
she saw
a soul in miniature

a bonsai
magnified inside
a glass terrarium

the flowering tree
and the One
wielding the ax

as the tree grows
so
it hones the ax

Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry affords a fine entrance into exploring the way Freud has been imagined by 20th and 21st century American poets. Irene Willis has compiled a fine anthology that will appeal even to readers who only have a passing interest in Freud.