Saving Daylight
“Saving Daylight throbs with an engagement to living. Levine, a former poet laureate of Arlington who now splits her time between New Hampshire and Florida, writes with a vital sensuality—alert to touch, loss, myth, and natural rhythms. ‘Petals wheeled / from the hub’s soft button. / And there seemed no end of you.’ Orpheus and Eurydice appear, as do Aphrodite and Emily Dickinson. She writes of witch hazel, asters, cattails, and bees; and she reminds us what beauty there is in the world, amidst changing seasons and stories told and re-told. ‘Better the far scene,’ she writes, ‘the small spume, pink, breath-hush rosettes, pinwheels / spun to extinction . . . The long view saves my neck tonight.’”
Saving Daylight
Miriam Levine
May 2019
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In Saving Daylight, her fifth poetry collection, Miriam Levine connects intimately with people and places. Levine’s poems express beauty inseparable from peril. They chart a world in which an infant turns his “head toward light,” while a mother fights “sleep to keep” him alive; where the tender sky is “baby blue,” while sea levels dangerously rise. Levine’s poems are set in the American landscape—northeast, southeast—in Russia, the Greek Islands, and in the poet’s mind when sleepless she remembers a friend’s last words, an important teacher, and the ravishing sight of a lover. Even as she mourns the loss of the near and dear they come alive in Saving Daylight along with flowers throwing off “streaks of light.” Worldly and innocent, Levine prays to “banish each disgrace” of her life,” as she invites self-forgetfulness and compassion.
Select Poems from Saving Daylight
“. . . alive to the erotic as it is to the elegiac . . . and everywhere the unflinching attention to friends and family. . . . What Miriam Levine sings about the perfect pitch and resplendent grace of Billie Holiday is true of her own mournful yet radiantly joyful eloquence: ‘You’ve seen pictures? Heard her young? / She could float sound across her completely relaxed tongue, / the furled petals of cattleya clasped like a hand against her head.’”
“I admire these poems for their unwavering commitment to the contradictions and complexities of our lives. Sometimes playfully, sometimes soberly, they orchestrate the pathos, comedy, terror, dignity, beauty and inevitability of our common predicament . . . There’s real wisdom here as well as the rich pleasures of new work . . .”
“Reading Saving Daylight is like . . . entering a garden . . . only there are people there too with their own colors and scents, themselves vivid and wildly alarming and attractive as anything in the natural world. Levine’s devotion to the senses, her knowledge . . . of plants, her keen cherishing of life—all contribute to a book that gives us . . . star magnolia buds . . . ‘in velvet cases / that shine along the branches / and keep faith with the future’—a tour de force of bravery and conjuring and high voltage passion . . .”