From Publishers Weekly
The follow up to Levine's debut Debt (1993) finds the poet spinning confrontational riffs on the same big questions that vexed him before: how can art survive a great disaster (a world war, say)? How can it not make promises it can't keep? And how far can a poem's language crack before it breaks up like an ice floe, giving a lyric speaker no place or tradition on which to stand? Levine explores these questions in poems whose agitated "I" and "he" and "we" can represent ghosts, or dead poets (as in a poem called "John Keats"), or "Everybody," as in the poem of that name: "Everybody is visiting the gravesite of the President/ leaving plastic cups filled with wine and chocolate./ Everybody is holding their breath as the song approaches its end." Where Debt addressed the Middle East and the Holocaust, the new poems sometimes depict with a surer hand the gutted and bombed-out landscapes of postwar Japan and Europe. Levine wants, and gets, disturbing, paradoxical, tones--deadpan awe, sympathetic self-suspicion, outraged weariness: "the splash is coming, the reader is coming, the law/ is coming wearing Mother's private wig." In "Susan Fowler" Levine's "he" (perhaps a spy) encounters a violent, bearded man whose "shirt said 'Susan Fowler'": "He wanted to laugh but could not decide/ if laughter was an appropriate response." The book as a whole is a kind of triumph, one which perhaps does for poetry what David Foster Wallace has done for prose fiction. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
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edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
Levine is the author of a previous collection of poetry, Debt. He received a fellowship from the NEA and teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. As a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and Outside, he has reported on environmental, social, and cultural concerns. Early on in this work, Levine presents several interesting excursions into the nebulous time of the ``Great War,'' when disease and disaster have ravaged the land and the gods were otherwise engaged ``pondering the sky from which they long ago fell.'' One is reminded of the dreamlike, post-apocalyptic world of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's short story ``The Portable Phonograph'': Levine certainly seems to shares Clark's conviction that mankind is fated to self-destruction and that, in a spiritual sense, it has already happened. Theirs is a gloomy doom of ashes and wastelands, damaged souls, and the broken contraptions of a civilization on whose grave they dance almost gleefully. Yet despite a promising start, Levine soon lapses into a private symbolism that becomes all too tedious to dissect. Picture, if you will, three Rod Serling Twilight Zone scripts about the end of the world, diced and blended and spliced, with every third word then expunged just in case any of it begins to make sense for longer than it takes to wind a melting watch. After a time, even Dali's landscapes appear habitable, if only because we have been there so many times before, haven't weor is this all just dark dj vu dreaming and shadowy foreboding? If you've been to one Armageddon, you've been to them all. --
Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
by Charles Wright
by D. A. Powell
by Myung Mi Kim
