Poetry. Winner of the 1998 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Stranded in that clockless month of her arrival,/ I listen to our neighbor sawing down back doors,/ rock her, tiny fists of breath uncurling,/ while the details of each afternoon are revealed. This is a luminous, breath-stopping book. Each poem is complete, each renders an intense encounter between the poet and what she loves: the 'sensate world' in all its complexity of color, contour, and human emotion. ... The eye makes us look while the words impel us toward feeling something of the poet's present -- a present charged with memories, hopes, and a sensitivity like that of the fontanelle: the soft spot on a baby's head invoked in one of the most striking poems in this brilliant first book -- Margaret W. Ferguson.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
A polished poet of extraordinary skill, Levine richly deserved to win the the 1998 Anhinga Prize for Poetry for this first book. Every page contains poems to be savored, digested, and reread, and the rhythm and fluency are breathtaking ("And here, the fog begins/ climbing the fields,/ erasing the roofline and walls of this house"). Vividly watery descriptions of rivers, streams, and oceans predominate ("In the failing light,/ a salmon leaps through the river's slate,/ edges broken gold"), as do poems on Levine's children ("I hold so tightly to all of these days/ when she is still young enough to heal us") and on relationships ("It's hard, love, always coming into something else"). With an understanding enhanced by her study of psychology (she has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Berkeley), she touches on the feelings of parents and the trusting innocence of childrenAknowing, as they do, that the future will inevitably bring pain. Levine is caught between wholehearted love of the world's beauty and sorrow at its unavoidable misery and suffering. Highly recommended.AJudy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
" A luminous, breath-stopping book..." -- Margaret W. Ferguson
"A polished poet of extraordinary skill.... Highly recommended. -- Library Journal
"This is a luminous, breath-stopping book. Each poem is complete, each renders an intense encounter between the poet and what she loves: the 'sensate world' in all its complexity of color, contour, and human emotion. ... The eye makes us look while the words impel us toward feeling something of the poet's present -- a present charged with memories, hopes, and a sensitivity like that of the fontanelle: the soft spot on a baby's head invoked in one of the most striking poems in this brilliant first book" -- Margaret W. Ferguson
Levine's "poems brim with a new and multi-faceted intelligence. I return to my life hungry for more..." -- Arthur Smith
"A polished poet of extraordinary skill.... Highly recommended. -- Library Journal
"This is a luminous, breath-stopping book. Each poem is complete, each renders an intense encounter between the poet and what she loves: the 'sensate world' in all its complexity of color, contour, and human emotion. ... The eye makes us look while the words impel us toward feeling something of the poet's present -- a present charged with memories, hopes, and a sensitivity like that of the fontanelle: the soft spot on a baby's head invoked in one of the most striking poems in this brilliant first book" -- Margaret W. Ferguson
Levine's "poems brim with a new and multi-faceted intelligence. I return to my life hungry for more..." -- Arthur Smith
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Exceptional Poet,
By A Customer
This review is from: Practicing For Heaven (Anhinga Prize for Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Julia Levine's poems continually land us in those places that are natural rifts or points of departure or beginnings and endings. It may be us at fourteen, when we are sneaking out at night, through the bedroom, to explore a furtive and fast love. It may be us in the American River in North Central California, after the winter run-off, wading in waters strong enough to take us away for good. It may be us watching comet Hale-Bopp, that old division between heaven and earth, where we live amid the dying, or soon-to-be dying, or the dying who have recovered, and the light above is a temporary smudge. Levine takes us to those moments, and she instructs us and herself to stay:............It would be easier for us to walk away, to leave those moments unattended. It would be even easier for us to falsely sentimentalize those moments, where after a near-death experience we vow to smell the flowers, to appreciate everything in life now that we have learned its value. Levine is intelligent enough to recognize the easy fallacy of that way of thinking, which actually dishonors the past. It's not that Levine doesn't appreciate the new and newly alive (how can that be after reading her poem "Fontenelle"?), but that she reminds us how important it is to love what has already been:....................... Levine reminds us that it is not enough to love the fire of a life, but its trace elements as well: the smoke and ash of what has already gone. At that moment, we may be then ready for what comes next.
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