Review by Rhina P. Espaillat

This recent work by poet Richard Levine is divided into three sections with titles that refer to very different aspects of the human lot: “The Law of Blood and Death,” “The Law of Peace, Work, and Health,” and “The Law of Endangered Environments, Viruses, and Hope.” As titles those are moving, but even more than that, bewildering: in what sense are those circumstances “laws”? Who creates and enforces them, and who is obligated to “obey” them, presumably as the living conditions under which they must live? Are they “laws” we impose on ourselves by choices we make that render such conditions inescapable? Are they punishments (or rewards) we earn from society by errors (or triumphs) we bring about that affect others for good or ill? Or are they the arbitrary rules of some dictatorial power that owes no reason to the population it controls?

Section One consist of poems, vivid in imagery and powerful of language, that illustrate the life lived under its “Law,” in the unmistakable voice of the soldier at the front; the marginalized Other; the despised and “different” stranger or victim of history who is therefore suspicious, defensive, and fearful; the wounded—physically, mentally or emotionally—survivor of racism or religious hatred; and finally those survivors responsible for looking after and keeping alive all of the above they still have left. One unforgettable poem titled “Fat Pickers” begins with this matter-of-fact detail about poverty at the point of starvation:

Your mother sent you out at dusk
to pick fat from garbage cans.
You wrapped it in newspaper.

The fat-loosened letters and words,
smudged beyond legibility, slipped
from the page. You didn’t care
what they said or where they went.
News could not satisfy hunger. (21)

Section Two presents the lesser risks of more commonly encountered daily lives: job-seeking; the class separation of craftsmen, professionals, workers and the often unemployed; economic inequalities; illness and the drain on the poor; environmental perils ignored too long; the passage of time and what it takes away…the list is endless. But tucked in there are the common memories of people we all know: ourselves, in fact, reading to our children and grandchildren, watching a beloved mate undressing for bed, barely aware of our presence, but arousing the old delight of decades ago, despite thinning hair and figures no longer seraphic. The poet gives married love its simplest and most moving recognition in a poem whose perfect title is “Round” (59). Another recalls holding a first grandchild for the first time on (of course) Father’s Day. This section, without fireworks or sentimentality, shocks the reader by tilting the scales alarmingly toward the surprisingly undervalued trivia Levine describes as “the stories we live.”

Section Three takes us out of the house, kitchen, playroom and barn, to the first home of the human being, Earth and its varied rooms of water, sand, rocks and soil: what the poet calls “the woods.” Here the poem thrills with passion so deeply felt and so controlled that it makes its point without the sermon we’re tired of agreeing with: in order to save the sweetness and richness of life on Earth we have to love it as much as it deserves, and we haven’t learned to do so yet. The fear of the many losses—extinctions, scarcity, even genocide, has not roused us enough to save our home, our neighbors, and ourselves.

What Richard Levine has done is begin with the old story we all know—the loss of Eden, and the many others that follow to this day despite the brilliant efforts of art to teach us the value of what is draining away, and the valiant efforts of science to halt the draining, because what we need to save us is enough clarity of vision—enough love of our common “family mansion”—to save what we ought to love most, whatever the sacrifices needed to do so.

The poet’s focus, right from the first word, has been not the impact of suffering on us, but the impact of our partial self-concerns, our insufficient total reaction to the one massive loss that threatens us more than war, social injustices, and the greed of those in power. What he is asking of us is to do something about Eden. And, oh yes—that may do something about the other, less troublesome stuff we sporadically work at solving, and even the tragic circumstances that waste and ruin so many among us! Wouldn’t that be a coup.