Customer Reviews

The Afterlife (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary)

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If there's one reason you should buy this book, it should be for the longer poem, "Linnets." Lately I have read many longer/sectioned poems that attempt to collect and organize seemingly unrelated images and scenes into a grand statement of something bigger. These ambitious attempts usually fail, but Levis succeeds "Linnets." Broken up into eleven sections, some are prose and some are free-verse stanzas, some are straight narrative and some are more lyrical. Some of the sections appear to flow in a sequence of event and some sections hit the reader with no warning at all. The reader is aways kept on his toes. ). The objects/characters are complex and do not stand for a singular thing. Linnets are offered as victims of psychotic men with twelve gauge shotguns, creatures capable of judgment and vindication, cursing spirits and "unthankful stuffed little corpses." The brother is portrayed as a violent perpetrator, cold, a man traveling the earth suffering for his crime, a lobotomized drone and disinterested smoking a cigarette. Linnets, rivers, lepers and the brother all sing at different points in the poem. Trees, linnet feathers and a bus all turn black. Like things in real life, everything is full of contradictions, everything has more than one side to it.