Mercury: Poems (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Levin, Phillis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140589287 ISBN 13: 9780140589283

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2001

Synopsis

In this new collection, Phillis Levin offers thirty-three luminous poems that extend her reputation as a master of form and an alchemist of the vernacular. In her work, she pushes the boundaries of sound, syntax, and sense--and ultimately makes structures incarnating the complexity of consciousness and the transfiguring power of memor

About this title

About the Author

Phillis Levin is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. THE NEA grant was awarded in 2007.

Reviews

Conveying a consistently sensitive disenchantment, or even dismay, the poems of Levin's third collection recall the quizzical, fixed unhappiness of a writer like Anita Brookner. Levin's speaker finds fault with an ex-lover (ruefully recalling, in "Morning Exercise," a hickey), her parents and "R.T., who was freckled and chubby,/ but seemed thoroughly happy in her body," and sometimes delves into a formalism so strict and traditional that the results recall 19th-century versifiers like Felicia Hemans: "I have believed in truth, beholding it,/ And many times have been deceived by it;/ For love is double, even when it joins,/ And dispossesses everything it owns." The title poem refers to a vial of mercury the speaker would take from her father's desk to play with, as a "reminder of the refusal to be destroyed," although she is unsure whether such somber thoughts were really hers as a young girl or are convenient screen memories. (Levin teaches creative writing at Long Island's Hofstra University.) Many of the short lyrics here try to pull profundities from blank meditations; "Intervals in Early August" asks, "Do you feel empty because the earth/ Is full, does a door slam shut/ When a gust promises to change you?," while the "Futile Exercise" of a suicide provokes the speaker to wonder, "How do I put together/ The hand that touched mine/ And the cold revolver// Ending failure/ When he pulled the trigger/ With the finger that found/ The splinter/ He was after/ Before." Longer elegies on the speaker's grandmother and "For a Magnolia" offer sensitive descriptions of encounters, and Levin's interpersonal acumen has made her popular on the pages of the New Yorker, the New Republic and the Nation. Taken together, though, these vignettes fail to get beyond their conceits.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Levin's intelligent poems use context as a lens to focus and refocus personal events, measuring human obsessions against time: "touch me, the letters say,/ knowing the ink is dry,/ that nothing will ever change them/ unless it does so utterly ("Instead of a Letter"). In her third collection of poems (following Temples and Fields and The Afterimage), Levin continues to write formal verse softened by slant rhyme and a loose yet audible meter (she is fond of the sonnet and has edited an anthology of sonnets for Penguin). The long title poem, written in tercets, invokes Mercury, "god of alchemy/ and currency, patron of traders,/ travelers and thieves...," to transform a child's dalliance with a vial of the substance, "infinite in its divisibility/ and equally indivisible," into a meditation on human relationships and father love. Much of the collection, including the quirky "Dancing with Allen Ginsberg," recalls the poet's childhood in Paterson, NJ. Recommended for all contemporary collections. Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140589287
• ISBN 13: 9780140589283
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96