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toniclark's review
5.0
In The Minor Virtues, Lynn Levin displays a mastery of craft and a delightful versatility in poems that showcase a mature poet’s intelligence and wit. Levin has a subtle and self-deprecating sense of humor, an obvious love of wordplay, and a comfortable familiarity with received forms. Though the poems here are mostly free verse, their appeal often comes from a flexible undergirding of rhythm and rhyme.
The Minor Virtues contains five sections: The Minor Virtues; Friends, I Burst into Your Day; Riddles and Such; To the Ether; and The Consummate Hour. Part 1 sets the tone of the collection, comprising poems in which the simple pleasures and random musings of daily life are elevated, by the poet’s attention, from the mundane to the significant. This is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the very first poem in the book, which begins,
I rescue them at times from the back of the store—
cellophaned oranges and apples
packaged good-side-up.
The same poem concludes:
More than anything I hate waste
and yet how much
of my own life have I let go unused.
The speaker’s generosity of spirit extends to broken things, clutter, pea tendrils, shoelaces, and dinner-table manners. There is virtue in rescuing what is past its prime, in repairing the damaged, making treasure of what can be salvaged, repurposed.
Part 2 contains more poems of everyday life: two Jewish delis, the irresistible song of the cell phone (which riffs on Ginsburg), a starling at the window, a guilty love of mooncakes, and more. In Part 3, we find a bouquet of brain-bending riddles (answers in the Notes), limericks, and a ballad of prison escapee Sleepless Johnson. In Part 4, the poet offers up a diverse array of odes and warnings, always with an eye toward what is “reaped from the bitter field,” the attempt to “love the hard-to-love,” the quiet admiration of “homely treasures.” And in Part 5 are more delights, including two poems about Lilith, in some Jewish traditions believed to be Adam’s first wife and the first feminist, who resisted male dominance. Here we meet a Lilith who becomes a storyteller and scribe, and who also tries online dating. I especially liked the ode in which the poet addresses her teen years (“My potato years, my toad years, my years in the dreamy wood”), that “unwise, underage parent of my current self,” and concludes that, could she offer them advice, she would only say, “Live as you did, correct none of your errors.”
This is a poet who notices the small pleasures of the world and who trusts the imagination to enrich her life, a poet who takes what she finds and makes the best use of it because she knows that “Never finding happens all the time.” And it’s impossible, she tells us, to think of nothing, for,
The hound of distraction is ever at the heels.
There will be plenty of time to think of nothing.
But now a bother comes to the sensitive oyster
and the oyster imagines a pearl.
Enjoy these pearls, Ms. Levin’s sensitive and generous poems.
The Minor Virtues contains five sections: The Minor Virtues; Friends, I Burst into Your Day; Riddles and Such; To the Ether; and The Consummate Hour. Part 1 sets the tone of the collection, comprising poems in which the simple pleasures and random musings of daily life are elevated, by the poet’s attention, from the mundane to the significant. This is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the very first poem in the book, which begins,
I rescue them at times from the back of the store—
cellophaned oranges and apples
packaged good-side-up.
The same poem concludes:
More than anything I hate waste
and yet how much
of my own life have I let go unused.
The speaker’s generosity of spirit extends to broken things, clutter, pea tendrils, shoelaces, and dinner-table manners. There is virtue in rescuing what is past its prime, in repairing the damaged, making treasure of what can be salvaged, repurposed.
Part 2 contains more poems of everyday life: two Jewish delis, the irresistible song of the cell phone (which riffs on Ginsburg), a starling at the window, a guilty love of mooncakes, and more. In Part 3, we find a bouquet of brain-bending riddles (answers in the Notes), limericks, and a ballad of prison escapee Sleepless Johnson. In Part 4, the poet offers up a diverse array of odes and warnings, always with an eye toward what is “reaped from the bitter field,” the attempt to “love the hard-to-love,” the quiet admiration of “homely treasures.” And in Part 5 are more delights, including two poems about Lilith, in some Jewish traditions believed to be Adam’s first wife and the first feminist, who resisted male dominance. Here we meet a Lilith who becomes a storyteller and scribe, and who also tries online dating. I especially liked the ode in which the poet addresses her teen years (“My potato years, my toad years, my years in the dreamy wood”), that “unwise, underage parent of my current self,” and concludes that, could she offer them advice, she would only say, “Live as you did, correct none of your errors.”
This is a poet who notices the small pleasures of the world and who trusts the imagination to enrich her life, a poet who takes what she finds and makes the best use of it because she knows that “Never finding happens all the time.” And it’s impossible, she tells us, to think of nothing, for,
The hound of distraction is ever at the heels.
There will be plenty of time to think of nothing.
But now a bother comes to the sensitive oyster
and the oyster imagines a pearl.
Enjoy these pearls, Ms. Levin’s sensitive and generous poems.
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