~GEORGE HELD~
KATHRYN
LEVY: LOSING THE MOON
The mute, distant
satellite makes her best nocturnal
partner, because
it is unattainable; in its new phase
it goes missing only to haunt
her
when full. For Levy’s
persona the moon is the
perfect object of devotion . . .
At a time when American poetry is rife
with autobiographical verse steeped in nostalgia and tinged by
sentimentality, Kathryn Levy has dug into her life with the precision
of a surgeon and the gravity of an undertaker. There she has found a
woman as eccentric (outside the circle of the anodyne norm) as Emily
Dickinson and as troubled as a figure in the work of Edvard Munch. More
important, she has found a voice as suited to its purpose as Sylvia
Plath’s.
Losing the
Moon, divided into five sections of 9-12 poems each, comes with
an epigraph by the German avant-gardist Botho Strauss: “For the
missing, nothing is impossible.” Accordingly, this volume contains many
people who are missing in one way or another, primarily through
death.
Thus the first poem, “Telling Stories,” concerns “A dancer on the
roof,” who falls or jumps to her death. A recurrent figure, spinning
through life and having spun to her death, that dancer represents the
precarious stability of the persona who tells all the stories in this
volume. An eccentric, the dancer “broke the tight circle” and went
missing. “I miss her, I miss asking questions,” the speaker says, then
says, “I stayed up all night thinking of death.” In this initial poem
Levy establishes that her collection dwells in the nighttime and dwells
on death.
Another element in Losing
the Moon is the claustral nature of the persona’s life: “I’ve
been staying indoors for weeks” (“Indoors”), she says in her flat tone.
“Telling Stories” adverts to her room, where, naturally, she spends her
nights but also, like Dickinson, spends much of the day too. When I
refer to Levy’s “persona,” I do so to distinguish between her haunting,
haunted speaker and the poet herself. We like to think that when we
read a poet with a distinctive voice, it is her “real” voice. But such
a poet is the rare bird who can vocalize like no other so that we
recognize her work immediately on the page. Achieving a distinctive
voice is fundamental to the art of poetry.
Here is how that voice sounds in “Hundreds of
Nights,” the second poem in the book:
Someone is spending a
life
up in the attic, preparing.
Last night he whispered,
come to me. I was too far away.
But I dreamed his voice
waiting for mine. In another room
an old woman paces slowly
wanting me to join her
for company—that’s all that’s
left.
At the end of the day a beam
cracks
somewhere inside each haunted
house.
These first eleven lines of a 27-line poem show the careful diction,
measured pace, and precise syntax that characterize Levy’s style, but
the tightly controlled voice is as vulnerable as that house with the
cracked beam. It is haunted by the missing: the man in the attic
preparing (for her, for suicide?), that woman in another room, and the
speaker’s sense of connection with others.
But Levy’s persona won’t let herself be haunted in
any conventional way: she rejects the child’s fear that a ghost in the
attic is coming to haunt her and confirms that “No ghosts came, no lost
friend. . . .” Thus she “held the air / all night,” an indication of
her empty life. The poem ends with no more than a hint of anything
outside her cloistered self: “Listen—that was almost // a sound.” The
last two words rest alone after thirteen preceding couplets, formally
suggesting the speaker’s isolation, the qualifying “almost” indicating
that her life is at one remove from the rest of the world. At first,
the imperative “Listen” and the following silence might sound comical.
Whom is she addressing? Only us, her readers; thus the poem is not
comical but chilling, because the speaker’s isolation is so complete.
Another important theme for Levy is dreams. “We need
to dream more / always . . . ,” the dreamer of “In the Glass” says, and
in “Freedom” “The
dream drifts on: It’s beyond my choice.” Sitting at her typewriter, the
speaker finds herself “dreaming of a day . . . ,” entering a trance
that both withdraws her from difficult consciousness and lets her tap
into the subconscious. For a persona as troubled as Levy’s, “to dream
more” means to live more outside her claustral, nocturnal life and to
spend more time in the world of the dream, a rich source for the
creative mind. Although many people today write poems, only a few, like
Levy, make art, because such poets can nourish the imagination by
dreaming, at night or “through a day of work, / tapping away // at the
typewriter keys.”
The last section of the book, which bears its title
and contains the title poem, recapitulates its themes. In “Losing the
Moon,” the speaker confesses she’s “been haunted for years / by the
full moon” and “the moon remains / my favorite lover,” to whom she
“will listen all night.” The mute, distant satellite makes her best
nocturnal partner, because it is unattainable; in its new phase it goes
missing only to haunt her when full. For Levy’s persona the moon is the
perfect object of devotion, because she can give it her attention,
while it needs none itself, nor can it reciprocate. Yet she realizes
that she “need[s] / more than his touch” and “want[s] / all the lovers
/ I will never hold.”
These poignant last lines would make a fitting
ending to the book, but unhappily, “Losing the Moon” is followed by one
last, anticlimactic poem. It’s an example of this book’s overabundance:
had it been limited to 60-70 pages, instead of 91, its power would be
even greater. Not all its poems — only two have been previously
published — are equally successful, and 91 pages of such melancholy
work might be more than some readers can bear. But for those seeking an
authentic new voice, Kathryn Levy provides it in Losing the Moon.
Levy, Kathryn. Losing the Moon.
Sag Harbor, NY: Canio's
Editions, 2006. ISBN: 1-886435-16-2 $14.95
© by George Held
