Phillis Levin – författare

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeAn 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.