Not all moments of frustration in poetry create pleasure. Sometimes, they bring pleasure and pain together in a compelling moment of poignance. Take, for example, the start of “Purple Bathing Suit” from Louise Glück’s collection Meadowlands:
I like watching you garden
with your back to me in your purple bathing suit:
your back is my favorite part of you,
the part furthest away from your mouth.You might give some thought to that mouth.
Also to the way you weed …
This is the same kind of stroke as in “Snow” from Ararat, where she says of being a young girl on her father’s shoulders:
My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn’t see me.
The incisive mind invades the expectation of tenderness, cuts it off and makes it sinister–the same experience as feeling shocked by cruelty in a moment of vulnerability, the same thing–in essence–as heartbreak itself.
I had the pleasure of seeing 
