Variations on a Theme of Love by Kathy O’Fallon

Variations on a Theme of Love explores a variety of kinds of love—love for boyfriends, husbands, children, grandchildren, dead brothers, beloved mothers, horses, dogs, fruits and flowers, and, perhaps most importantly, self—in a selection of thirty exquisitely written jewelry box-like poems.  

The book’s cover art couldn’t be more appropriate. It shows Michelangelo’s iconic creation fresco, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, of God’s hand (index finger outstretched), almost touching Adam’s hand (index finger outstretched). The fingers that either fail to or are just about to touch, electrifying Adam into life, like Keats’s lovers not quite kissing on the Grecian Urn, make a fitting metaphor for the book’s constant theme: the connections—pending, fulfilled, or just missed—between the speaker and the objects of her love.

The book’s first poem—“Sunrise and Dogwood: A Reconciliation”—describes a photograph, taken by a lover, of a sun rising between two yards. In the photograph, each yard symbolizes a separate plot of ground (e.g., the soul) that wishes to, but is prevented from, merging. The book begins: The moment when dream-speak bridges / the veil between worlds. Blurred boundaries, overlapping lines, separate but united fields, worlds barely divided, by veils, by a tilt of light, speech caught between dream-weaving and articulation suggest a world where the craved bridging of two souls fails.  

O’Fallon’s theme of missed connections, failed or tenuous love, passes through many variations in the book. In “Listening for Tchaikovsky,” the speaker finds comfort beneath her mother’s wing as she tries to avoid the slingshots of [her father’s] tempers. In “The Golden Gate” O’Fallon paints a friend’s loveless childhood when she writes, if you were born lucky … if you were loved and beautiful / bridges wouldn’t tempt you to jump.  In “Brothers” a boom box—set up to play a dead brother’s favorite song at his wake—flies off a funeral table and breaks.

In “Santa Anas: Devil Winds,” the author finds a picture of herself sitting on her father’s lap and thinks, When I was young I must’ve called him Daddy. In “June Gloom” the author talks a suicidal brother off / the ledge again as he is working hard / not to pull the trigger. In “Lament of the Golden Hawk” the speaker wants a man whose heart she broke once and who will now never / love me back.

But while suffering is everywhere admitted, Variations on a Theme of Love ultimately celebrates joy. Interestingly, that joy is most often achieved not with others, but in a kind of ecstatic self-celebration. In one very striking poem, O’Fallon sings an exuberant “Ode to My Index Finger.” In “To November” she hails an adolescent self, riding a horse from a paddock into self-assurance. In “Plum,” the speaker laments her lack of a lover even as she eats a gray-green velvet plum, sensuous and satisfying as human lips. In “Sculptor,” the narrator makes a mold of her hand out of clay and sets it on an altar, as if reaching up with a beggar’s delight, hungry for God.

God, beauty breaks me quicker than love

In the semi-ecstatic poem “Gratitude,” the speaker inventories the things of this world she is grateful for: a strawberry moon that twin[s] its image on water and space that is not really space but / grain after grain after grain. And in the gorgeous poem “Olympiad in Training,” the poet stops and pulls to one side of a swimming pool to gawp at a sleek Adonis racing in the lane beside her: the arch of his biceps / aglow with victories …I can hardly / keep my hands to myself. God, she writes, beauty / breaks me quicker than love.

The crystalline quality of these poems comes of O’Fallon’s cool, quick eye for detail, ear for music, and habit of density: a packing of concrete, carefully chosen images, and a rich, almost jeweled vocabulary. We see the world in the round in these poems, as if we were turning a glass globe in our hands, a full 360 degrees. Here a bedroom has curtains frilly as sonnets (“‘Fire Only 15% Contained’”), and outside a church window the speaker sees swans gliding like little steepled / churches (“Out the Church Window One Sunday, Swans”). In the end, for all its elucidation of suffering, Variations on a Theme of Love most deftly celebrates the kind of love one can count on from the self: rapture.

Lisa Low was first runner-up for the Shakespeare Prize at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work has been shortlisted for Ploughshares and has appeared in many literary journals including The Adroit Journal, The Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Hopkins Review. Her first chapbook, Late in the Day was issued in July 2025 from Seven Kitchens Press.