Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Levine's pessimistic, even apocalyptic third volume picks up where Enola Gay (2000) and his influential debut, Debt (1992) left off: startling and slippery images, and fast-moving, even disorienting poems depict postmodern scenes so fragmentary, noisy and degraded that the would-be poet, prophet or rebel can barely see or say what's going on. And yet, as he has before, Levine finds in this grim confusion not just style but panache: "The patient climbs down his sinkhole/ hand over hand, impatient. Look. No hands." Where his previous jeremiads focused on money and war, Levine's new book concentrates on the environment, on woods, ponds, fields and the devastation human settlement can bring; a persistent subplot concerns children, schooling and schools, as if to ask whether poetry could teach us anything worth knowing. The result is a significant ecological poetics. One sparkling poem depicts a "sunlit trench// in which a root was/ notched by the tool's/ dull edge"; another warns an ill-fated willow tree that "human traffic with its rinse/ of promises and pauses is coming/ for keeps." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Levine's third book of poetry (after Debt and Enola Gay) is filled with meditative lyrics that juxtapose different kinds of diction. As the book proceeds, the poems grow rich in their peculiar explorations of memory and the natural world. Here are studies of the past, where "we were boys, boyish, almost girls./ Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled," and of the present, with its memorable lyrical portraits ("he wore an air of soiled gravity./ Like a man on a child's train"); there is also a dimension "bent by knowledge of the divine/ collecting us at the exit." Levine's poems are made alive not only by the clarity of the remembered detail but also by the music of their abstractions ("Swimming for the cord she/ trailed from the hem of her appearance"). But his work is most interesting when it leans away from musings on grammar toward emotional maturity-a point where he dares a simplicity that truly pierces ("These two women will never meet./ Your mother, my mother. My mother, your bride. My aster, my Philomel, your crone,/ my vocalise). Such moments, attentive in their tenderness, resound with the classical poetry of the English tradition. For all poetry collections.-Ilya Kaminsky, San Diego State Univ. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
