Poetry review – THE KAMA SUTRA FOR SENIOR CITIZENS: Peter Daniels admires a collection by Zak Rogow which brings wit and generosity to matters which, sooner or later, will be of concern to us all
The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens:
and other poems on aging
Zack Rogow
Valley Press
ISBN:
70pp. £12
Zack Rogow is American and mostly published by University of California Press, but Valley Press of Scarborough have done a service by publishing this book over here. Not only a service to senior citizens either, I hope, though the book will echo the older person’s experience of day-to-day living, as well as the highs of love, sex and other enjoyments. “Don’t worry / if you can’t do all the moves” he says in the title poem,
and even if you can’t anymore,
there are more types of passion
than peaks in the Himalayas.
This is a very readable book, which unusually I finished in one sitting. The poems are mostly free verse which is fairly loose but does have line endings that make it more than prose, as good free verse will, pacing the movement to let the words deliver their full effect, which doesn’t have to be particularly dramatic:
We might have met when we were seventeen,
when we didn’t even know how it felt
to touch a body unlike our own.
(“Other Times We Might Have Met”)
There is plenty of wit here and the rhyming poems are apt vehicles for it: he is bold enough to take a famous rhymer as the voice in “Lord Byron to His Daughter Ada”, but this is not him as Don Juan but something more poignant, a dying father whose daughter can only know him from his verse. Elsewhere he uses typographical arrangement of a free verse poem for more than pattern on the page, but the words themselves:
H o w a s t r I n g o f h o u r s
makes a day
(“Domino Days”)
or going full concrete-poem in “The New Hip”, though I have to guess that the vertical text represents ordinary sticks not the eventual walker with wheels, so it doesn’t feel as successful. But Rogow’s inventiveness, alongside solid technique, is of a piece with finding new ways to use and reflect on experience, not repine over the losses and embarrassments of a life. His generous spirit shines all through the book, and I recommend it.
Aug 10 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Zak Rogow
Poetry review – THE KAMA SUTRA FOR SENIOR CITIZENS: Peter Daniels admires a collection by Zak Rogow which brings wit and generosity to matters which, sooner or later, will be of concern to us all
The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens:
and other poems on aging
Zack Rogow
Valley Press
ISBN:
70pp. £12
Zack Rogow is American and mostly published by University of California Press, but Valley Press of Scarborough have done a service by publishing this book over here. Not only a service to senior citizens either, I hope, though the book will echo the older person’s experience of day-to-day living, as well as the highs of love, sex and other enjoyments. “Don’t worry / if you can’t do all the moves” he says in the title poem,
and even if you can’t anymore,
there are more types of passion
than peaks in the Himalayas.
This is a very readable book, which unusually I finished in one sitting. The poems are mostly free verse which is fairly loose but does have line endings that make it more than prose, as good free verse will, pacing the movement to let the words deliver their full effect, which doesn’t have to be particularly dramatic:
We might have met when we were seventeen,
when we didn’t even know how it felt
to touch a body unlike our own.
(“Other Times We Might Have Met”)
There is plenty of wit here and the rhyming poems are apt vehicles for it: he is bold enough to take a famous rhymer as the voice in “Lord Byron to His Daughter Ada”, but this is not him as Don Juan but something more poignant, a dying father whose daughter can only know him from his verse. Elsewhere he uses typographical arrangement of a free verse poem for more than pattern on the page, but the words themselves:
H o w a s t r I n g o f h o u r s
makes a day
(“Domino Days”)
or going full concrete-poem in “The New Hip”, though I have to guess that the vertical text represents ordinary sticks not the eventual walker with wheels, so it doesn’t feel as successful. But Rogow’s inventiveness, alongside solid technique, is of a piece with finding new ways to use and reflect on experience, not repine over the losses and embarrassments of a life. His generous spirit shines all through the book, and I recommend it.