Review of Now in Contest (Fernwood Press 2023)
This is only the 3rd full-length collection published by Levine, and it is a pleasure to finally have. The organizing principle for the collection is a quote from Louis Pasteur:…
“Two opposing laws seem to me now in contest. The one, a law of blood and death, opening out each day new modes of destruction, forces nations to be always ready for battle. The other, a law of peace, work and health, whose only aim is to deliver man from the calamities which beset him. The one seeks violent conquests, the other the relief of mankind. The one places a single life above all victories, the other sacrifices hundreds of thousands of lives to the ambition of a single individual.”
Michael T. Young, North of Oxford
Review of Richard Levine: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019) and Contiguous States (Finishing Line Press, 2018)
Both of these books by Richard Levine are wonderful and full of wonders. Many of the poems are about Vietnam, the actual fighting and walking in mud, and seeing death all around.
One of the best is “Beauty on the Wing”, …
Stephanie Rauschenbusch, American Book Review
Review of Contiguous States
“Richard Levine’s first full-length collection of poetry, Contiguous States, explores the continued impact of the Vietnam War, veteran reintegration, love, and one’s power to rehabilitate the self and the natural world. Deeply personal, Levine guides the reader through his spiritual journey, from broken veteran to wizened poet, in five conversational and beautifully wrought sections.“
Aaron Bristow-Rodriguez, The Literary Review
Review of The Cadence of Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2014)
Richard Levine’s The Cadence of Mercy insists the contradictions of praise and blame, the march of events, belong to us all. Are [we] suffering/ from loss or too much memory? And in “Fall,” the recurring wonder of tenderness: Didn’t we fall into that exquisite /embrace with nothing to hold / us up but each other?
This is a spirited collection, ranging from the historical fate of the Indians, the Holocaust, our melting pot America, the ritual blessing of making bread, the [Brooklyn] Dodgers, Vietnam, what we learned on the playground and in school: Leaving for holiday, I pack / language and inventions we shaped, history/we made. All our fingerprints are there.
Nicholas Johnson, Founding Editor, BigCityLit.com
Review of A Tide of a Hundred Mountains (Bright Hill Press, 2012 Chapbook Award)
“Many poets strive to marry aesthetic demands with a social conscience. It is a difficult marriage that many are only occasionally successful at. Richard Levine is consistently successful at this difficult balance. This is true of his earlier work as with his current collection, A Tide of a Hundred Mountains.”
Michael T. Young, Inner Music
Review of That Country’s Soul (Finishing Line Press, 2010)
“If, like me, you’ve tended to shy away from contemporary “nature poetry” since the time of the anemic examples of the genre that were common in The New Yorker soon after the middle of the last century, you would do well — in fact, I think you’ll be exhilarated — to engross yourself in (you won’t be able to simply skim) the work of Richard Levine in his new book, That Country’s Soul, from Finishing Line Press.
The “country” of the book’s ambiguous title is not some other nation, but the country that opposes or at least stands way outside of town. Although the author is a resident of Brooklyn, that most urbanized locality, these are the poems not of a weekend gardener or out-the-window gazer, but of someone (charcoal stump in hand?) slogging along in dead leaves and mud, his senses as alert as they could ever be.
The interval between Levine’s observing or registering and notating his impressions seems uncannily immediate — his participation in nature’s density jumps off the page while ensnaring you in its virtual silence — and the result is a group of twenty poems that, for the most part, convey the powerful atmosphere of woods and streams in ways that would have done Emerson proud. I choose that name with care (the boldness of Whitman came sooner to mind; see the final poem, “Jacob’s Ladder Aslant”) because uniting these poems is a transcendentalism that approaches but steers clear of religion, beautifully articulated in “Believe This.”
Whether in the formal structure of a villanelle (“Owl Creek Credo”) or in looser forms, Levine’s poems are expertly crafted, yet his skillful line breaks and delightful wordplay don’t dilute their considerable ambition. In this impressive little collection, variety of style is matched by unity of theme and purpose: as the author says in the last line of a neat little poem (“You Don’t Miss Your Water”) about animal metaphors (“sly as a fox,” etc.), “Surely, poetry lives or dies with the flora and fauna.”
According to the “Acknowledgments” page, just over half the poems in this book have appeared in journals; that’s a goodly proportion, but considering their overall quality, I am surprised that it isn’t higher.”
Martin Mitchell, Editor, Pivot, Rattapallax, BigCityLit, The Same
Review of A Language Full of Wars and Songs (Pollack Press, 2004)
“A Language Full of Wars and Songs, the title 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 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.”
Daniella Gioseffi, Mad Hatters’ Review, Issue 2, 2005