100 Aspects of the Moon [Paperback]

Leza Lowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 2005

Poetry. "These poems are about the mind's amazing ability to perceive itself at exactly the moment when the self is least stable: the moment of change. ONE HUNDRED ASPECTS OF THE MOON is a rich poetry of awareness in motion"--Jack Foley, host of KPFA Radio's "Cover to Cover." Leza Lowitz is the recipient of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Aware, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for the translation of Japanese Literature, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and literary fellowships from the NEA, NEH and the California Arts Council. She currently resides in Tokyo, where she directs the Sun and Moon Yoga Studio.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Leza Lowitz was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley, where she learned most of what she knows about life at Malcolm X Elementary School. She has a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Creative Writing/Japanese Literature from San Francisco State. She first made her way to Tokyo in the early 1990s. After a return to California, she relocated to Tokyo where she now writes and directs the Sun and Moon Yoga Studio.

Product Details

• Paperback: 119 pages
• Publisher: Printed Matter Press; First Edition edition (March 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0935086366
• ISBN-13: 978-0935086362
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,553,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful poetry, wonderful and inspiring read, December 18, 2009

By 

Peter Tieryas "Liu" - See all my reviews

This review is from: 100 Aspects of the Moon (Paperback)

100 Aspects of the Moon is an amazing book. At times, quiet, at others, shockingly powerful, every poem not only provokes complexities of emotion, but is a beautifully crafted melody evoking the lyricism of a painting- much like the works of the artist, Yoshitoshi, from whom the title was inspired. 'Amazons' is on the surface, three women at a sauna. But the subtext has so much more- pain, sorrow, and redemption in the simple act of revealing themselves in front of one another. 'Pt. Reyes Seashore, 2002,' is one of my favorites, partly because I used to love going there when I lived in the Bay Area. Reading the poem brought back memories of visits there:
There's a texture to the landscape / Things bleed into each other... / ... There's no applicable /measure of sea and sky / The trail is as long as conversation...
The Leap: Epithalamion, has my absolutely favorite description of marriage (which on a personal note, I read to my fiancé several times, and she really enjoyed it)
It's the most extraordinary poem of all / It's alive and grows better in the retelling / Each year a new image, word, voice / Emerges out of nothing, /Flowers into a garden of verse
Other favorites include Ministry of Misinformation, the Spirit of America, and the Philosopher. For a funny but disturbing poem, read Winter Coats. And finally, The Fire is especially palpable, blazingly so, not just because of the titular fire, but because of the descriptions of her relationship with her mother.
I thought my whole life would flash in front of me
But in the burning, mother, instead I saw yours...
In the prefacing note, the poet writes that she wrote many of these poems, "to mark a passage, to commemorate a life cycle shift." In the process, she's commemorated a hundred subtle emotions, a hundred nuances of relationships, a hundred and more different ways to celebrate life and the process of healing.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Praise for Leza Lowitz's Third Book of Poems, December 30, 2006

By 

www.printedmatterpress.com "Printed Matter Pr... (Tokyo, JAPAN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 100 Aspects of the Moon (Paperback)

Published by Printed Matter Press, Tokyo, 2005.
Paperback, 120 pp, with a Foreword by Donald Richie
ISBN: 0-935086-36-6 U.S. $15.00, 1,500Yen (Japan)

Among the many memorable lines in this elegant, passionate book are these: "this is what transformation looks like--/ the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life." One Hundred Aspects of the Moon tends to center in the perception of a crossing, a sudden awareness that some monumental change has come upon the self. Yet the book is anything but nostalgic: everything in it struggles to accept change--or at least to see it with renewed clarity. Lowitz writes that the moon has not only a "hundred" but thousands of aspects. These poems are about the mind's amazing ability to perceive "itself" at exactly the moment when the "self" is least stable: the moment of change. One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is a rich poetry of awareness in motion, awareness of motion. One poem asks, "What would you save if your house were burning down?" Lowitz--like Cocteau--would save "the fire."

--Jack Foley, Poet and Host of KPFA Radio's "Cover to Cover"

"Just as the moon reflects the sun's light, Leza Lowitz's poetry reflects a life fully lived, illuminating transformations of various kinds. Informed by wisdom both ancient and contemporary, Eastern and Western, this book reminds us that the impulse toward creative renewal is what helps us to thrive in whatever dark corner of the psyche, or the world."

--Kim Addonizio, Author of "The Poet's Companion" and "Tell Me"

Leza Lowitz is that rare poet who stays focused in the clarity of the mind's "now," whether she is immersed in the natural beauty of the northern California shoreline or contemplating Old World architecture & its ghosts of sorrowing geniuses & martyred innocents. This is a woman with an exceptionally fine-tuned mind who is not afraid to listen to all the ambivalent nuances or her own thought & to share them openly, as if the reader were her best friend. Lucky we all are to have her new collection.

--Gerald Nicosia, author of "Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac," and "Love, California Style: Selected Poems."

From the Foreword by Donald Richie:

"O," sings T.S. Eliot in "The Wasteland," "the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter and her daughter," the ellipse of the "o" echoing the shape of the orb reflecting the light of the spent sun down on Mr. Sweeney's friend and her child.

Though Eliot himself was echoing Marvell and hence relaying reverberations of all those higher things for which the moon once stood, this use of the lunar orb to merely illuminate a pub plebian and her offspring also indicates more common, more modern uses for its light, particularly when he informs us in the next line that, "they wash their feet in soda water."

Whatever else it is, this peculiar activity is quotidian, an ordinary and apparently daily activity. This too, says Eliot, the moon illuminates. Not only the chaste and the classical, the mystic and mysterious, but also the mundane.

The mundane is secular, typical of this world, concerned with commonplaces, indeed, quite ordinary. But it is this ordinary quality that is also precious, and it is this which Leza Lowitz celebrates in her poetry. Here the moon has many seasons, takes many shapes, but what it shows is the daily reality of the poet. The light etches her concerns and at the same time illuminates her metaphors, creating a lovely lunar landscape of the mind.

This poetry uses icons as ancient as the moon itself, but it is morally modern. Undisturbed by common faith, it is assured in its moral weight. Assured and assuring. These statements of things as they are, illuminated by the steady light of experience, make extraordinary the common. Here, Lowitz lavishes us with the sparkling ordinary, pure and precious precisely because it occurs every day, every night--shining there above us, just out of reach.

(c) Donald Richie
Tokyo, Japan

About the Author:

Leza Lowitz has received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry, among many other honors. Her work has been broadcast on NPR and NHK, and has appeared in Harper's, Ms., ZYZZYVA, The Japan Times, The Broken Bridge, An Inn Near Kyoto, 100 Poets Against the War, Prairie Schooner, and many others. She is the recipient of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature, the Tokyo Journal translation Award, and literary fellowships from the NEA, NEH, and California Arts Council. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry. She currently resides in Tokyo.