Curve

DESCRIPTION: 1994, Poetry, 80 pages.
The story is yearning, the mirror is broken, every shard a discrete part of this puzzling. The story is palimpsest, the mirror is clouded; its irregular pieces, jagged and possibly dangerous, alert us with alacrity that this writing confronts the relationship between the apparent whole, a one-ness (lost? illusory?) and "its" existential fragments. In virtual overlays, "salvage device plants," "myth of the not her blood" and "the replication of care" diagram memory and experience topographically, anatomically, historically, ahistorically, economically, epistemologically...emotionally...syntactically... "It’s more than just a window." The searching contemporary American idiom teases discrepancies of experience, dream and thought to its refractory surface, inviting the reader to join in this acute scrutiny. We are placed in the urgent reading of the I and you as immediacy.

"Everything is readable/No one knows what’s next" – these lines late in his book characterize Andrew Levy’s poetry. That we can’t decide whether intentionally or not makes the pleasure of Curve all the greater. John Cage liked best "art that is incomprehensible (Joyce and Duchamp) and...art that is too nose on your face (Satie)." Andrew’s poems seem at once to have both these qualities. "Such artists," wrote Cage, "remain forever useful...in each moment of our daily lives."

Andrew Levy uses thought to restructure language in the direction of feeling. Andrew places feeling against the grid of thought. Which of these is correct? – In the central section of this book Andrew has written some of the most lovely love poems of our time. That is the answer.

the lines as shadows altered resolving transpire

there’s a part of me

somebodyelse’s soul and body the idiocy of age

full of images in an earlier poem

some invisible propensity our history stays

Flying over the delta in the translucence of their

error the new missions smoke trail

‘I don’t mean that much can be explained’

clarity cuts me

their desires I remember to lie

re-work their complaining care

to shore knees with reasonable rules

them all poetical

fall apart in my hands.

You cannot see yourself is the

surest sign that you’ve died.

I was dead, the sun goes

down, fresh bone and barrow

sprouts from out of ground.

Every hidden root of thought

eyes open limbs tangled

soft lips rest on my hand.