At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered / Jeffrey Levine ; foreword by Ilya Kaminsky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levine, Jeffrey, 1949- author.

Kaminsky, Ilya, 1977- author of introduction, etc.

Contributor:

Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--21st century.

American poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

81 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland : Salmon Poetry, 2019.

Summary:

Two hundred years ago, the great rabbi, Simcha Bunim, offered a teaching. Each of us has two pockets. In one, a note reads, "For my sake was the world created"; in the other, "All I am is dust and ash." Take stock of your needs, the rabbi counseled, and reach into the appropriate pocket. In this, his long-awaited third book, Jeffrey Levine offers readers a dazzling redaction of the rabbi's advice. Emptying his innumerable pockets, Levine spills forth poems of radiant image and dialectical thinking. We need not choose between affirmation and humility, Levine argues, in tones that are at once urgent and agnostic ("The one neither, the other nor"). On the page, at least, we get to have it all: ravishing desire and feasts, prophecies, "night dreads," "a lost thought boxed within a certain light," ekphrastic poems that upend tradition. In the poems that grow out of his encounters with paintings by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and the Scottish painter David Roberts, Levine goes far beyond the spinning out of the image that meets his eye. Poem attaches to painting like a gessoed layer, integral to the painting because integral to the poet -- a secondary self-portrait that offers a glimpse of the artist in mature command of his power both to reveal and conceal.

Contents:

Part I

[Figure 1, Leporello Considers the Heavens] p. 13

Although Madame Did It on the Grill p. 14

Licking the Bowl p. 15

He Delivers Unto Her His Blessings p. 17

Working with the Lepers p. 19

Lucretia, Just After p. 20

On Finding to His Amazement a Tuscan Red p. 21

The Sorrows of Our Gods p. 22

Half Matter [in a Material World] p. 23

Egg of the Universe p. 25

A Spell p. 26

Mid-April Night with Blessing of Snow p. 27

Vox Humana p. 29

[Figure 2, Lovers] p. 30

I Would Cross Three Africas for You p. 31

Antiphonal p. 32

Arabia Petra p. 34

The Jewish Bride p. 35

Other Effects p. 37

Perhaps unspeakable history, and this seepage proceeds p. 38

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholaes Tulp p. 39

All Ten Thousand Mountains p. 42

Part II

At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered p. 45

Low-Hanging Orb, Smudged Green p. 47

A Midsummer Night's Basho p. 48

Blue, and Calling p. 50

Frogs p. 51

[Figure 3, Imagine the body as hand] p. 52

At supper the child p. 53

Riverbeds in which p. 54

The garden began with a large black crow turned like the world, upside-down p. 56

Xanthippe p. 57

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde, or religious as if I were French? p. 58

The Art of Aqueducts p. 59

Notes from the Book of Frailty p. 60

Task Me, Trapeze Me p. 61

The Inch-Wide Heart p. 63

And What of the Redhead in the Supermarket? p. 64

I squander boxes heaped into other boxes p. 66

Whiplash Beauty, an Offering p. 67

Stealing the Fundamental Tongs p. 69

Getting It Right p. 70.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

ISBN:

9781912561384

1912561387

OCLC:

1081391292

Publisher Number:

99983906268