To Know We Are Living
“These are extraordinarily moving poems. Miriam Levine writes of the drama of generations amid the richness of nature amid urban settings. A fine collection!”
To Know We Are Living
Miriam Levine
1976
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The poems of To Know We Are Living show super-sensitivity and resilience. Intimate expressions of connection to people and places, Miriam Levine’s lyric poems address the living and the dead: family, children, lovers, friends and admired writers. They chart the poet’s mind alive to life’s contradictions and history’s tragedy.
Select Poems From TO KNOW WE ARE LIVING
“. . . what admire in her work is the evident authenticity and intensity of her images, and the intelligence and literacy with which she discovers the vivid words of her experience. Feast, one of the poems in this collection that I like best, well exemplifies both her achievement and her potential: it makes us share a kind of terror, while the economy and firmness with which it is wrought give pleasure; thus the poem provides . . . something of the experience of catharsis.”
“Miriam Levine is not just another modernist poet straining for effects: each of her 40 lyrics, stripped down and scraped clean of diffuseness and cliché and sentiment, runs rarely more than a page or two . . . they seem pointilliste—spaced out dabs and thrusts of color and implication, under and overtones . . . These are adult poems, with their unique trademark of odd, sharp austere imagery and deep thrusting insights . . . Miriam Levine should name her next volume of verse . . . Black Rainbow . . . it would convey the pulsing, paradoxical, haunting nature of her unpredictable verse.”