Small Boat

by Lesle Lewis

In Small Boat Lesle Lewis's craft rides the waves of the New England landscape both internal and external. If her world is a collage, as she says, then her poems provide the glue that anchors everything from shifts in the weather to world events to a cacophony of thoughts. When two sentences collide, a new relationship begins, and Lewis's poems bring sense to these complex and disparate juxtapositions. Small Boat , in other words, both creates an exciting chaos and provides a soothing faith.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 2003

About the author

Lesle Lewis' collections include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), and A Boot's a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). Her chapbook, It's Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. She has had poems appear in American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Landmark College.

Reviews

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Cricket Season

Our bodies are flowers, our legs the double stems, our chests the petals, smoothed down and back like feathers,our heads the emerging seedcases, so smooth we can’t get in or out. Nothing is graspable,nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished for certain.
If we let go of our seeds, bronze, paper, fanned air, daughters, olives, knees, an ivy-framed window, reincarnation, spiders, male from female, an old man’s young male nurse, we will be empty. If we have to, we’d like to at least give them up grandly, like two million happy people, like young salmon released, like the number of notes sung to one syllable, multiplied and multiplied, the melody most “spiritual.”
We wobble forward on our stems, our leaves the hands to make stews, cheeses, our own arrangements, a campfire. The fire finally cracks our heads open and our seeds sprinkle around our feet. Surrender.
We breathe in the flames smoky and wild.
It’s very gentle and quiet and our skulls are left wide and completely eased.
Our flower bodies take their thousand year naps.
There’s heaven after heaven.
We have our own fields to moonbathe.
We love every star

A Baby Crying on the Train

Your mind knows a lot that it doesn’t share with itself and the ignorant part wakes up and goes exploring drawn to the open for gold.
There was a she-dream about it, and she spoke irrepressibly, ambitions secret to be the most beautiful girl you know.
But you are sick of beginner’s mind, the way of powerlines running by, the yes, the pretty river.
The air moves rawly believing that feeling the dark is this hard boulder dropped into an otherwise unbouldered woods.
So in the end, the end hangs.

[H]

"the rich must remember the poor and the poor remember the beautiful" (1)

"tomorrow will become no longer vacant" (7)

"The fun I have with you, I have with no one else... A pale yellow body turns away. You watch the body turn away" (31)

"I am all the things I take time for and what I am is not that important to hold onto anymore. I take off my shirt. I am my body in the sun. I think about swimming. I am the thought of swimming" (35)

"Love is of the inner organs. The grasses move aside for baby truths...The day swallows us and spits us out into Tuesday. Our limits we can and do dare exaggerate" (37)

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Small Boat is my proper introduction into the work of Lesle Lewis. Poet Rick Bursky posted two of her more recent poems, and I figured, why not start at the beginning? Here we have whirlwinds of poetics dancing between narrative and lyric and dream. To spend time with Lewis' work is to slowly float.

Lines like, "All night I waited for you to saw off my head," and "Why does only the head need a pillow?" and "It is the horses in the trees" and "It is the moon over the hat."

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lewis's imagery is subtle and strange:

*...We are four humans in the woods watching a porcupine.
We live in a more fortunate day.
Between us and the laurel bush, a fire and lots of smoke and snow behind the bush.
We don't have to notice.
The ache pours down our backs...*

AND she's got a thing for birds:

*...But the birds are quite clear in what they are saying: "You live and when you remember living."...*

[Tonia Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warm, visceral, kind, and honest, this collection of poetry by Lewis stretches the being and made me long for oceans and forgotten memories.