A Charm Against Eros

Beauty has become easy. It entertains, distracts, flatters, and passes. A Charm Against Eros begins from the older and more unsettling conviction that beauty makes demands. It asks something of us. These poems follow desire into marriage and fatherhood, into memory, history, art, friendship, and death, discovering that no finite object can bear the full weight of our longing. The result is neither renunciation nor romanticism, but a poetry that presses beyond both. Michael Yost moves with equal confidence through richly ornamented lyric, classical form, and the hard clarity of everyday speech, writing poems that find the permanent not beyond ordinary life but within it. Here, Bernini and Homer stand beside maple trees, children's voices, country roads, and the rituals of domestic life. Between nostalgia and despair, these poems discover a harder hope. They suggest that the deepest pleasures are those that awaken desires the world itself cannot satisfy, and that poetry still possesses the rare power to restore forgotten dimensions of experience. In an age that mistakes appetite for freedom and novelty for vision, A Charm Against Eros offers something more difficult: a language in which beauty once again tells the truth.