Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight: Poems

Barataria Poetry Series

by Julia B. Levine

"A polished poet of extraordinary skill.... Levine is caught between wholehearted love of the world's beauty and sorrow at its unavoidable misery and suffering." -- Library Journal

With an astonishing grasp of language and detail, Julia Levine enacts a visceral, lyric experience that slips wildly between and within tragedy and grace. In Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, her fourth collection, Levine offers far-ranging subjects, including poems about a friend's suicide and the poet's own interactions with traumatized children, as well as a series of revision poems that question the imagination's infinite possibilities for creation. In "Strolling in Late April," a woman with dementia wanders in a park filled with springtime beauty, while in "Tahoe Wetlands," the speaker recalls a rape at gunpoint through the merciful distance of time.

At times humorous, ironic, and even redemptive, these poems are infused with lush images of the natural and physical world. Levine's work pries apart small places that exist within the spaces between beauty and trauma in an ordinary life. Ultimately, the poems affirm our human resilience, made possible by the presence and help of others: "carrying something of the unbearable / between us until it could be borne."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2014

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heart-wrenching and moving poems about family, tragedy, loss and survival.

[Story Circle Book Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

"to look, to wonder
which is crueler, memory or forgetting?"

Julia Levine poses this hard question in "Poem Ending with an Unanswered Question." It is a question that Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight never completely answers as it makes a case for remembering in the forty-three poems that make up the book.

Taken alone, these poems are entrancing in their own right. Levine's sense of place is as strong as her insights into human nature. Taken with the themes of disaster and hope, the poems present an entrancing collection.

For this reader, not all of the disasters seem small—a father's death, a bereft mother, divorce, joined twins—but clinical psychologist Levine views these hard situations and many more, not as hopeless and, often in fact, offering hope.

All of us face disasters, if not the ones depicted in these pages, equally distressing ones, and all readers of poetry can gain insights into their own feeling and reactions. Likewise, there is sunlight in all lives. Often it's a matter of focusing the sunlight on the disaster.

I'm reminded of the words of Catherine the Great: "I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster."

by Trilla Pando
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women