Mr. Memory & Other Poems
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- ¥2,000
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"It is hard to hang a clothesline between stars," Levin writes, but she shows in her fifth collection that if anyone can do so it's her. This gathering of lyric pieces, short series, and anecdotes displays an admirable facility with forms (haiku, trimeter, some rhyme), but Levin improves on them by adding a light touch to the most serious subjects. The title poem punningly follows the (murdered) minor character in a Hitchcock film: "how innocent/ Memory stays, how well to the end/ He behaves: an unassuming man." A set of 11 austere memorial poems includes elegies to family members as well as the poet Toma alamun. But it is by no means all elegiac. Levin has edited an anthology of sonnets, and she deploys unobtrusively a few here. She can also be funny, as when an X-rayed Brueghel painting reveals "something in the snow: it appears/ To be an array of ham and cheese," or when a few poems animate an alter ego named Zeno, "his hope rising/ without weight or measure," aware of how little we change, how far we can go. Pathos and sweetness dominate the careful, information-rich book, which should appeal to readers who admire Robert Pinsky or Gjertrud Schnackenberg.
