Orphan

by Jan Heller Levi

Praise for Jan Heller "It's Levi's humanity that ultimately won't let you loose, words as direct as bullets, as kisses."—Bob Holman Orphan , Jan Heller Levi’s new collection, is an unabashed confrontation with loneliness, otherness, and abandonment. These poems—ancient, immediate, serene, disgruntled, wickedly humorous, unsettlingly earnest—are also daring explorations of what love is. In the new millennium, with so much loss to mourn—and so much more still to lose— Orphan contemplates how “we make our griefs our tools.” What Love Is To forsake all others.
To float the beloved on your back
from flood to land, to wrench bread
from the beggar's hand, snatch
the oxygen mask from a child's face.
To ransack hospitals and nursing homes
for drugs to ease the beloved's pain,
to stumble down 101 floors, beloved
slung on your back, not stopping
for the other ones in wheelchairs
waiting at the landing doors. Jan Heller Levi 's first collection of poems, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder , won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and poems from her second collection, Skyspeak , won The Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America. She is editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader , served as consulting editor for the new edition of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser , and is currently writing the biography of Rukeyser. She lives in New York City with her husband, the Swiss novelist and playwright Christoph Keller, and teaches at Hunter College.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 2014

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a real challenge to be conversational without being trite; I think Ted Kooser does this well, but it's because he makes simple, universal observations. Orphan spends most of its time overcorrecting, being too flippant in the first two sections and too referential in the third and fourth. For example, there's a way to write about the frustrations of caring for a person with disabilities, but it's not in the first-draft, surface observation way that Levi writes. It's one thing to make a remark about your loved one's ass hanging out (her words, not mine), and that it's "not dignified," but the very next poem makes the same observation using the same phrase. Though there was variety within the collection, each section felt strangely narrow and repetitive.

Most of the time, contemporary poems tend to be strings of sharp phrases punctuated by the occasional dud. These poems felt the opposite way, with mostly chaff and a few good lines. It's not a good sign when the first and third lines of the very first poem both contain cliches (which aren't even modified or played with in any way). Occasionally, the voice improves, and I find this comes when the content shifts into something more traditionally poetic, such as observations on writing or nature. Levi has a commendable eye for noticing disability, but she doesn't transform those observations nearly enough for them to reach the same level of poetic feeling that the other more traditional topics of poetry achieve in her work. For example, one poem starts "it is true / i wanted to write a book so holy only god could open it / so only a stone could read it." That's some A+ material right there, I'd salivate over a book entirely like that.

But by the end of that section of poems, it seems like Levi is worried that we don't trust her poetic credentials, because she keeps referencing poets. Eventually, she has a whole section dedicated to poems in the style of "Praise Poem: [Insert Poet Name]." These felt a little tryhard, and the only one I really enjoyed was the Muriel Rukeyser one (this reminded me I need to read more of her work!). Her Emily Dickinson poem was especially underwhelming, and Levi even dedicated one to herself (?), which felt like an unnecessarily pompous move. The statement she seemed to be making was putting herself on the same level as those others, which I would respectfully disagree with.

The final section, which the notes explain is inspired by Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, was easily my favorite section (I might be biased, as that's one of my favorite books). In these poems Levi felt like she finally hit her stride, finally spoke in a poetic register which transcended the quotidian. One of my favorite poems was the following:

(6)

my teacher's son asks, when is tomorrow?
he also says, they shouldn't call it a fire truck. it's a water truck

rain slashing slantwise across the window

“ “ “ “ “ “

the room breathes in anemones
breathes out her life

so let's call the bad dream the good dream


There was something mysterious about it, but it still retained the childlike wonder and simplicity that I think Levi was going for the whole time. Another poem called "The World," which shows up almost exactly halfway through the book, was marred by only two bad lines: "The boys trudge ahead like little men / pretending they have no worries." This I think encapsulates what went wrong in so many of these poems: the phrase "like little men" is such a tired simile, it deadens immediately, takes one out of the poem and back into the world of cheek-pinching grandmothers and "good enough" mediocrity.

Of course, some, if not all of this might be an issue of taste, as I can't stand most of the work of Billy Collins (because I find him similarly flip and trite), but he's fairly well-respected and well-known. Perhaps I'm just being too much of a stickler, but I really don't think so. I believe we can hold poets to a high standard, because the genre is already hated/ignored enough as it is, what would a little more elitism really hurt?