Kirjahaku

A sensuous and musical new collection from acclaimed poet Phillis Levin May Day is a work of a visionary imagination. In tones playful and celebratory, in gestures both intimate and international, Levin's poems explore how tenderness and violence change our lives. From a flood overtaking the Prague zoo to the joy of a maypole dance, from a mural of the Trojan War in a Greek diner in New York to the "noiseless explosions" of time in the opening of a flower, these poems are rhapsodies of the senses and the intellect, disclosing new thresholds of meaning.

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.

Using nature and history as her raw materials, Phillis Levin crafts a world alive with ideas. In striking experiments with form, rhyme, and meter, she examines the condition of our species. Levin is a voyager in these poems, cataloging the earthly spectacle, tempering her lines with an irony that strikes an immediate blow at the heart of things. By turns rhaposidist and rhetorician, visionary and witness, she transforms the cycle of love and death into a majestic music:Machines have their own seasons, revolvingAround us, though nature is not their fulcrum.They too move beyond repair to neglect,But cannot die like a diving falconOr repeat, in the end, names that inflectAs the sum of one’s parts stops working.Unconverted by death, they know nothing Of the glory of noise and the daily Trade of the ugly and the beautifulWe have listened to, in stories of manyFor whom engines were passions, and the feelOf life the sense of a great sound building.In language that fuses the discursive and the lyrical, the contemplative and the dramatic, Phillis Levin renews metaphysical inquiry. Temples and Fields becomes finally a study of joy and terror—“the meticulous counting down / Of beginning leaf and scattered petal”—and of the primordial link between the human and the divine.

Phillis Levin's much-anticipated sixth collection, An Anthology of Rain, is a stunning series of poems immersed in time while acknowledging "How it is / Is not how it is / It keeps changing." Yet the fleeting presence of so much in this lyrical collection is what the reader is gifted. In poem after poem, memories are stirred to become as palpable as the present in this poet's keen imagining. Even a remembered duel of roses between friends and across languages is itself a cause for delight, as is the vision of a father returned to life to assuage the poet's grief. Light and water are the twin elements that course through these poems, whether it be the " b]lighted light" of a leaf turning inearly fall, or the "orb of light" (a water droplet caught in her father's hair) that entranced the poet as an infant, or the drop of rain in the brilliant title poem, "An Anthology of Rain" that invites the reader to follow its movement and receive the rain that "receives you." Such a spirit of reciprocity between poet and reader animates this collection and is a poignant reminder of what the best poems offer: that thrilling sense of immediacy even in the face of flux.