GOW Archives: New Unpublished Lyn Lifshin Poems

Reviewed by Geddy Gibson

It’s been said that completist fans of prolific poet Lyn Lifshin will likely never track down all her work. She tends to submit large sheaves of new poems to lit journals, allowing the editors to pick their favorites to print. One imagines flurries of poems like ticker tape suffusing the literary world, some landing in the right hands, others ending up who knows where.

The Guild of Outsider Writers was the lucky recipient of a couple of slabs of Lifshin’s magnificent recent work. Although she tells us the works are unlikely to appear in print together soon, we decided to review them en masse as if they were an actual collection.

Many of Lifshin’s poems center on an object that for her evokes memories and emotions, as well as more general lessons and themes. She uses the concrete and ordinary to bring out the universal and–often–the profound. Here, for example, is the conclusion to “THE GERANIUM”:

…It’s only a plant, not someone
dying in a colorless
hospital room, their body
enough like a flower in water
that already smells. I kept
this flower going like an affair
I put too much time in to leave.
And now I’m left with
what’s dead.

Death is a specter that haunts many of these poems. While it is obviously one of the Big Themes in poetry, Lifshin avoids simply relying on it for easy allusions. Instead she conveys raw feelings of foreboding, loss, and resignation where death is concerned.

APRIL 25

the pear, swollen
with rain
not the sharp scent,
sweat of wild apricot
but floating ghost trees,
boughs in the distance
the night’s darlings.
Snow that hovers at the edge,
your memory

Whether or not she is working with larger themes, the reader gets a sense of peering into Lifshin’s world in these poems. The details of her life are often fragmentary, delivered in snippets. The people she refers to are sketched with a line here, an allusion there. But somehow Lifshin ushers us in, and we get the sense that we know her. A stellar example of this tendency is entitled “IN THIS OLD NOTEBOOK,” excerpted here:

…I want to be
a poet like you she grinned
at break, her father’s
worst nightmare. I think
of what I’ve said about
him in books, how he
saw me as some mare who
wouldn’t take the bit,
wouldn’t jump. But
that’s a lie. I was the
one lunging for his ankles
out the door like a thrown
rider in reins…

Another treat to discover in these packets of poetry is apparently part of Lifshin’s process as a poet. A good number of her poems are variations on an image or thing. The central voice erupts and flows down the sides of these peaks of interest in varying patterns. Or maybe she sees herself like a jazz soloist, exploring the nuances of the repeating chord patterns. Reading the different poems while knowing the similarities they share, you get a visceral sense of the unfolding of Lifshin’s thoughts. Consider these excerpts:

WHEN I CAN’T SLEEP

Today I think of
the child bound and raped,
snatched from sheets,
pillows smelling of her
tawny hair. I think of her
clutching the purple dolphin,
her heat, her blood in
terror, holding on to that
one thing as something
that could not have
been human tore life from
her smile, her body…

WHEN I HEAR OF THE CHILD

pulled from sheets

from her small dog
deep under quilts.
When I think of her
asleep, maybe dream-
ing of kittens when
the monster grabs her,
I remember a woman
in my sorority getting
the news…

SHE KNELT OVER THE PURPLE TOY

she was holding the
stuffed  dolphin, a
favorite, the last
thing she could
hold on to. She
must have burned
from where his
body was a knife.
The trees roots
singing an under
world bed of earth.
No dog, no arms.
No breath.

While a published collection of these recent works may be a long way off, there is no need to start your own small press in order to get sizeable chunks of Lifshin’s excellent ouvre. Whether you tilt at completism or not, there is plenty to be found at through her website: http://www.lynlifshin.com/