A LANGUAGE FULL OF WARS AND SONG
poems by Richard Levine
Pollack Press: New York, Winter 2004.
pollackpress@verizon.net
Richard Pearse, Publisher
Printed at the Print Center, Inc.
225 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014-4304
ISBN 0-9760521-0-5 38 pages. $9.95

A Language Full of Wars and Song
poems by Richard Levine

Reviewed by Daniela Gioseffi

“A Language full of wars and song,” the titled of this collection of poetry, is a quote from a Neruda poem translated by W.S. Merwin, and it is in the Neruda tradition, rather than the T.S. Eliot tradition, that Richard Levine fashions his poetry. Levine’s language is colloquial and very American. His forbears are Whitman and William Carlos Williams—not T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. He is far from The New York School of poets influenced by painterly experiments in abstract expressionism. He is influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by what Edward Hirsch would call the emotional and more human branch of 20th century poetry, the branch fashioned by the greatest beacon of the 20th century’s Americas, Pablo Neruda. To explain, Edward Hirsch has written to this reviewer:

What I have always responded to in Neruda, I think, is the depth of his humanity, which goes even deeper than his politics. He writes from a human centered universe, and a great sympathy for other people flows out from his work. Neruda's humanity is not something to be taken for granted. At the time I first read him I was putting myself to school on Anglo-American Modernism, and I couldn't help but notice that Eliot and Pound, for all their greatness, had banished a certain warmth, a humane tenderness, from their poetry. Indeed, a certain coldness became a kind of critical dogma, which was passed on to the New Critics. Neruda, and other poets connected to him, like Lorca and Vallejo, seemed to offer a much warmer and engaged form of Modernism.

Richard Levine’s poems mainly aim for the heart and are life affirming. His themes are urban, working class, family life, the failure and success of relationships, love in both its whimsical, erotic, and ironic forms, the horror of the Holocaust, the miseries and folly of war. The poem, “Annette,” for one example, recalls the experience of a polio-crippled schoolgirl ostracized by her healthier schoolmates. There is a subtlety in the poem that brings us to empathetic feeling. The speaker is expelled from school for his rage in defending the crippled girl from the naïve mockery of her fellow students. “In line, you were made my partner, looking away/ each time I took your cold-sweaty hand. Miss Burgess/ made me. The others said I’d catch and pass/polio. They stopped talking to me. No one/ chose me in team games. Then, I punched/ Lenny Grant in the stomach, for talking/ with his tongue between his teeth. You were/ right there, pretending he wasn’t mocking you.” The speaker of the dramatic monolog is expelled and when he returns to school, he finds Annette quarantined to Special Ed. He concludes: “…Holding your hand, I saw/ the sure-footed world sneer and retreat from your/ gargoyle-burden, while you tried to believe/that we, too, were better beneath the surface.” [pp. 35-36.]

The drama in Levine’s poems is not sentimentalized. His language is direct and unpretentious but the words are carefully and economically chosen. In poems like “Epiphany” and “To Open the Open Gate,” his lyricism provoked by the simple glories of the natural world, and the thrill of being alive in the momentary wonder of it, affirm the poetic spirit: “…standing on the threshold of that charged/ now, I thought I saw life lived more/ keenly in step with every breath and the world/ becoming itself. I reached to open the open/ gate, feeling new in the same old place.” [ p. 19.] This kind of epiphany wrought in simple words and direct observations comprise poems that convey feelings with which anyone who has lived with what Eugene O’Neil called “The Touch of the Poet” can identify and share. They make us feel less alone in our skins and that is the true purpose of poetry, to share experience with emotional and moral resonance. The book begins with a powerful sequence of poems on the experience of a soldier wading through the mud and the wounded of the Vietnam War, achieving survival by the thin skin of fate and ends with filial feelings and memories of a father lost. The poets’ experience ranges from that bloody far-off war back to the streets of Brooklyn and every day life... It is the speaker’s experience of survival that deepens his appreciation of the everyday. The book comprises the truth of an old and true adage, which one might quote from The Bard: “Sweet are the uses of adversity, which like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his crown.” Living through the horrors of war and memories of the Holocaust has brought the speaker of these poems to a renewed appreciation of life glowing in the ordinary moment. There is no theme more profound than that which is offered in this slim volume of unpretentious yet emotionally resonant language of war and song. Richard Levine is a feeling poet worth the reading. His turn of phrase is original, yet in the tradition of Neruda and Williams, both W.C. and C.K. –that branch of American poetry concerned with humanity and moral choice more than mere experiments with language. This little book published late in the life of a hard-working public school teacher, was worth waiting for. There is so much solipsistic drivel, or witty display of shallow intent, being written, falsely praised, and foolishly published in our time that it is refreshing to read a poet who still cares about communicating—through carefully wrought, deeply ironic, and unsentimental language—with the human heart.