A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
An intimate, richly textured new collection from Phillis Levin, a poet
whose work shimmers with gracefulness (David Baker)
Phillis Levin's fifth collection of poems encompasses a wide array of
styles and voices while staying true to a visionary impulse sparked as
much by the smallest detail as the most sublime landscape. From
expansive meditation to haiku, in ode and epistle, dream sequence and
elegy, Levin's new poems explore motifs deeply social and historical,
personal and metaphysical. Their various strategies deploy the sonic
powers of lyric, the montage techniques of cinema, and the atavistic
energies of the oral tradition. Throughout this volume, the singularity
of person, place, and thing--and the plurality of our experience--assert
their uncanny presence: an ash on a crackling log, a character from
Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, a burgundy scarf, an x-ray of
Bruegel's Massacre of the Innocents, and a demitasse cup from Dresden
are all woven into a collection by turns rhapsodic and ironic, caustic
and incantatory. The pre-Socratic mathematician Zeno facing the riddle
of an ordinary day; a cloudbank of silence; a pair of second-hand shoes
bought for Anne Frank; two crows at play above the peak of a mountain; a
dot flickering on the horizon: intimate and philosophical, these poems
unveil the metamorphic properties of mind and nature.
