Book Review: Love and Endless Love

Liana S

Love and Endless Love by Lilia Marie Ellis, giallo, 2021

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

The two epigraphs of Lilia Marie Ellis’ bold and beautiful chapbook, Love and Endless Love, come from Corinthians and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Like both these texts, Lilia’s book has an epic spiritual scope as the poet confronts pain and cruelty with an amazing spirit of resilience.

Formalistically, these poems reveal a distinct style, shaped almost as stream-of-conscious prose poems (parenthetical statements abound), but musical, lapidary, as if Lilia has polished the most salient parts of human experience. The opening poem, “Love and Endless Love,” was published in trampset and sets the stakes for the rest of the book. “Outside, the roar of unending,” the poet says. “Forever the same evils eclipsing themselves like painted horrors on a merry-go-round.” It’s a vivid image, this merry-go-round, but we recognize it as the world we live in. The poet points to something, though. Something in the poem also surges unendingly: “the only infinity we’re capable to give.” The force of love, as beckoned by the poem’s title, is also present, also real.

An optimism springs from these poems. Not cheap optimism, but hope pooling beyond the scars of trauma, a deep well of thought and feeling. “I’d like to believe in the kingdom of hope which each carries chestward,” the poet says in “Ode to Cruelty.” There is hesitation, yes, because we know the narrowness and violence of humanity. Does love even have a chance? In “God in the Wreckage,” we get close to an answer, the moral crux of this collection: “choosing my miracle recklessly as one would a horror.”

Whoa. “Recklessly.” Lilia recalls the best of Kierkegaard, “the leap of faith.” A choice that is reckless, perhaps, in the face of so much damming evidence, but a choice nonetheless. A leap into the miraculous. An assertion of love. An existential force that seems transgressive against the overwhelming cruelty and cynicism of modernity.

Love and Endless Love evinces the best of humanity. It is a short but moving collection that signals the arrival of a thoughtful, articulate, and necessary voice in American poetry.