Casanova in Venice: A Raunchy Rhyme
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Kildare Dobbs was born in 1923. Running in Paradise, an early memoir, won the Governor General's Award in 1962, and in 2002 he was made writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. He also received the National Magazine Award for journalism. His The Eleventh Hour: Poems for the New Millennium appeared in 1997.
Wesley W. Bates was born in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. One of Canada's best-known wood engravers, Bates has ventured into book illustration (W. O. Mitchell's The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon), film (Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry), commercial art (the voyageur motif for Upper Canada Brewery), letterpress publishing (through his West Meadow Press) and acoustic country-played, naturally, on a bouzouki. A collection of his engravings, The Point of the Graver, was published to great acclaim in 1994. A retrospective of his engravings In Black and White was published by Bird & Bull in 2005, with a revised edition published by Gaspereau Press in 2008. He now maintains his studio, which is open to the public, in a nineteenth-century storefront on the main street of Clifford, Ontario.
The poems are ribald and droll, a cunning linguist in the style of Catullus, Lovelace in Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" or Alexander Pope, wherein an 18th-century man of letters and lovers has illicit assignations, languishes in prison at Leads near the Bridge of Sighs, invokes "Scarface" and talks of syphilis.'--Nathalie Atkinson "National Post "
How exactly did the world-renowned playboy come to be, and what was it that made him tick? Kildare Dobbs's most recent poetry collection, "Casanova in Venice: A Raunchy Rhyme," provides insight into these questions and more as he takes readers on a very rollicking and sometimes thought-provoking journey through the great lover's life.
Using Casanova's own "M?moires" as the framework for the nineteen narrative poems in this collection, Dobbs provides readers with a broad understanding of Casanova's life -- from his early childhood to his later years, when the myth of the man grew to epic proportions. Dobbs presents Casanova's experiences of abandonment by his promiscuous mother; his adolescent years, when he was surprised by early stirrings of desire; the reversal of fortune, when he saved a senator and became his heir; his arrest and jailing by the Venetian Inquisition; and his later escape. While the collection may be read for the sheer pleasure of the raunchy rhyme, ' Dobbs's use of Casanova's history fleshes out the history's story, lending additional realism to the tales of his earthly enjoyments with countesses, nuns, and everyone in between.
The raunchy rhyme, ' as noted in the title, is the supreme delight of Dobbs's collection. Throughout the book, readers watch outrageous trysts develop while listening to hilarious double entendre (Awake, my lute!') and surprising, memorable rhymes (fondle her' and gondola'). In Pheromones, ' Dobbs explores Casanova's powerful chemicals: Two nuns a hundred yards away: / one whiff -- they're in the family way.' In Love of Women, ' Dobbs lets readers in on Casanova's affair with the young, Countess Countless': He loves her truly for her mind / and really exquisite behind / who to behold evolves a pang, / -- it's like a beautiful meringue!' The poet's use of rhythm and rhyme not only moves the narrative forward, but lends an extra kick of fun to the ribald situations Casanova puts himself in.
Throughout the collect
