Poetry Review: Fair Creatures of an Hour

June 11, 2010

Review of Lynn Levin, Fair Creatures of an Hour

Borrowing and adapting her title from Keats (“And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,/That I shall never look upon thee more…”), poet and translator Lynn Levin brings to mind Blaise Cendrars’s affirmation: “Live, first of all, live. I am of the earth.” Nearly every poem in this collection (Levin’s third) concerns itself with the business of living, with everyday transactions, with the unceasing need to cope, while drawing strength from friends and pets, and from a deep well of humor. The tropes the poet avails herself of are rooted in ordinary – and often refreshingly surprising – items from your kitchen, your bedroom, your tool shed. The emotional drive, too, is often a response to pressing issues, to daily aggravations and perceived slights, perhaps minor in hindsight, but powerful at the moment you experience them, even as you try to self-heal and remind yourself: “Peace is passing up the dessert tray of revenge.”

Lynn Levin’s poetry is eclectic, quirky, contemporary, and distinguishes itself by refusing to belong to a single school of poetry. The reader will find poems in appropriated forms (horoscope poems) and received forms (the triolet and sonnet), as well as list poems, narrative poems, addresses, and other types of lyrics. A significant portion of Lynn Levin’s poems convey a Jewish sensibility and quite a few deal directly with Jewish subjects. Here readers will find a meditation on the afikomen entitled “Whatever You’re Looking For,” in which a friend advises the speaker to keep searching for that last bit of matzoh. The skeptical speaker observes:

Though I had no idea
what this meant, I felt it was
excellent counsel, for that which was hidden

was bound to be wonderful
like mystic wisdom
or self-knowledge

(provided that you were a good person
and self-knowledge
did not destroy your ego).

“Numbers” offers a wild riff on the theme of the red heifer, and in “Azazel” the original scapegoat – a talking goat, why not? – observes that “the first year was the worst/for I was alone and misery loves company.” Over the years, Lynn Levin’s poems have appeared inLilith, Kerem, Judaism, Reconstructionist, and The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (New York: URJ Press, 2007). Her Jewish poems engage the Bible, prayer, and tradition in a voice that is, by turns, deeply serious, comic, bemused.

Fair Creatures of an Hour contains a series of horoscope poems, some intimate, some less so, addressed to seemingly lost or lonely souls; the tenor of caring is urgent in each case. In “You Are Charmaine and You Live with Raoul, Your Cat,” Levin earnestly proffers consolation and advice to Charmaine: “Maybe he did see you buying Gerbera daisies/in your brown wool dress with pearls./Watch for romantic opportunities/but try not to be so forward this time.” Or in her “Happy Birthday, Bernice” the poet playfully chides: “Despite your tendency to cancel social plans/at the last minute, you remain/popular with friends.”

When the poet is not addressing others, she turns inward, searching for clues, for ways of being in the world, connecting seemingly disparate elements. Here, too, attention is given to what we might term “small things” “physical needs,” but however small and physical, and thanks to their concreteness and their placement in the poem, they attain the heightened reality and complexity of a moment lived. In “Munro Park,” the poet speaks of walking alongside “the dog of my life” and dreaming of cold chicken and television, while:

A cable truck was out connecting everyone—
and all the living room windows glowed
like dioramas of the ideal life.
………………………………………………………
Overhead a red-tailed hawk flew into its eek,
and a rabbit ran for cover
believing that life was glorious
as long as you could get away with it.
But my heart didn’t beat with beauty and terror.
All I wanted was a belly rub.
Well, a belly rub and supper.

Always wise, warm, and finely tuned, the genius of these poems lies in the observing eye, in the intelligence and underlying empathy that inform it. Levin easily draws us into her orbit and her familial circle because hers is recognizably ours. It is the minute that counts, she seems to tell us, even as we’re inclined, maybe compelled, to rush forward, taking care of this and of that. The sense of time passing permeates the poems, and it is telling that the first poem in the book is “To the Future.” Here Levin addresses a personification of time to come:

Distant city of shimmering inventions,
you only love what’s new.
Nostalgia and loyalty
with their pleading faces
just annoy you.

Where there’s life and future there’s death, accidents, and the past. Advocating life, Levin’s language sparkles also in grief and mourning. Language, after all, is our survival tool. In “Nuclear Scan of the Crab Nebula,” the poet opens, quite coldly, even detachedly, with a description: “Bright with gamma rays,/the lymph radiates out on its journey.” We soon learn it’s the poet’s mother lying on the bed, and that the two best loved each other from a distance. But when the radiologist “took his long needle and shot/the isotopes into her breast/cancer I felt that old blue Windex-sting in my eyes.” This brief mention here of the blue bottle of Windex is both poignant and economical, providing a visual that is relevant to the antiseptic hospital room, and evoking a whole set of emotions having to do with the traditional concept of “women’s work” and the mother/daughter relationship.

The past is given its due (“Having wasted my youth/I don’t mourn you one bit.”), and the present, too (“Rarely have I lived/in your opportunity—/but more often/in old sorrows, new worries.”) Regrets are not voiced, but are certainly felt. The last poem in the book, and one of the most affecting, is addressed to an exit sign; this current journey completed, the poet exits the book, while life, at least for the time being, goes on. One gets the sense that Levin, like her poems, wishes she could radiate outward in ever-growing circles, and so transform, if not the entire world, then her immediate here and now – not for glory but for some sort of continuity and for the opportunity to give thanks, be it to an exit sign we will all follow, perhaps with the thought: “If only all farewells were happy,/this world not too beautiful to leave.”

Fair Creatures of an Hour was a finalist in poetry in the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and Levin’s previous collection Imaginarium was a finalist for ForeWord magazine’s 2005 Book of the Year Award .

Poetry Review: Fair Creatures of an Hour

Tsipi Keller

Arts and Culture