Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat sounds like the title of a portrait, and indeed this is a work of portraiture: a subject closely observed, meticulously populated with colour, and elaborated into vivid, arresting life.
That subject is a very particular queer love, one that Costa renders both with tenderness and shamelessness – at turns eros, at turns agape, decadent in all the senses of that word. That also makes it a stark piece of melancholia, but the kind of melancholia you’d want to take a bath in.
No mean feat – these poems make of the reader a lateral thinker, finding lush beauty in sadness, richness in absence, colour and taste and music in places colour and taste and music ought not to be, and in language they ought not to be in.