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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 54 > Reviews >Lynn Levin's Fair Creatures of an Hour

Fair Creatures of an Hour
Lynn Levin
Loonfeather Press
ISBN Number: 9780926147287

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          What makes Lynn Levin’s third poetry collection, Fair Creatures of an Hour, worth a second or a third read is her consistent humor, her deft strokes of word choice, and her horoscopic portraits. Her poems are fun to read not only because they are unpretentious, but also because they make something as ordinary as a sock sizzle. The title, “Fair Creatures of an Hour,” comes from John Keats’ line from his sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be”: “And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,/ That I shall never look upon thee more….” Living in the present moment, being a “fair creature” of that moment before fate makes choices for you, is the emotional core of this collection, as Levin's apostrophe, “To the Present,” amply illustrates:

I stand before your conveyor belt
like Charlie Chaplin
in Modern Times,
behind in all things
late and quickly.
Hangliders and lovers
say I should seize you—
but for your is,
there’s nothing at all.
Yet often my courage falters,
and, like you, I am
a terrible waster of hours.

          Besides her aforementioned horoscopic portraits, Levin includes an eclectic mix of subjects: apostrophes to hair, the future, the past, an exit sign (the last poem), a long narrative about the race horse Smarty Jones, Old Testament stories, socks, Venice, Peruvian travels, and tragic parachuting. We can guess that Levin is the type of poet who scours the newspaper daily and clips out articles that absorb and worry her. For instance, she must have been inspired by the tragic fate of two skydivers who had been lovers and whose chutes entangled on July 4, 2005. She turned their story into the unlikely hopeful poem, “Freefall”:

Parachuting’s the last thing I’d think of
doing for fun, but to Ron and Sara the danger
was sublime. They were skydivers, no strangers
to the wild plunge. Solo for years they dove
until they met and quickly fell in love
over the lonely earth whose losses and angers
appeared small to them. Momentary hangers
in the air, they danced and knew just when to move
apart. Until in a lateral spin one veered
too close. Their bodies caught and strings entwined.
Both canopies collapsed. Was it Sara
or Ron? Who wasn’t careful, who steered
wrong? “No blame,” said friends, “should be assigned.
In love and jumping you always flirt with error.”

          Levin’s horoscopic poems speak and flow into each other since they are situated as pairs throughout the four sections. All of these poems have quirky titles that prepare the reader for what’s next, and they specifically predict the future for the hapless horoscope subjects, as opposed to typical horoscopes which only prophesize in general terms. In “Paula, File Clerk, Student, Receptionist, Student, Childcare Worker…” the reader knows this person immediately and intimately:

As the fourth Libra moon enters your house, a roof beam will land
on your sister’s head. She’ll take the baby with her
to the hospital leaving you to care for her three-year-old.
Call the baby’s father? No way since Sis
played around on him. Just hope Mr. Schaeffer
will understand. You’ve already no-showed for work
five times this month.
Tonight: Macaroni and cheese, Barney tapes, weed.

          Levin’s two solar system triolets, “The Universe, The Big Balloon,” and “A Triolet for the Red Planet” are also deliberately placed next to each other. A triolet is an eight line poem with the first, fourth and seventh lines identical, as are the second and eighth lines. Picking the subject matter for this form poem is difficult since the poem is circular, but Levin delivers music and enchantment with “A Triolet for the Red Planet”:

Was there ever life on Mars? Its arid zones
seem carved by floods. Its gorges
are of red rock; all its states are Arizonas.
Was there ever life on Mars? Its arid zones
look barren. Our rovers find no bones
just iron compounds for Martian forges.
Was there ever life on Mars? Its arid zones
seem carved by floods, violent and gorgeous.

          As with her use of red in the poem above to paint a picture of emptiness, Levin uses color to evoke challenge and determination in “The White Puzzle.” 

Once someone gave us a white puzzle,
A real head-breaker, the blank pieces
many and small like the counties of a state.
This was fitting for the sake of fitting.
No art in it that we could see, but we stuck to it,
and after a while the pieces began to clump together
like new snow on the lawn.

          She also likens her black anklets to “two blackbirds” in “Anklet.” She loses one of her socks, and finally it turns up after six months. She writes:

I kept watch, waited
The way a parent waits for a prodigal child
to quit the road, knew that a lost sock
found was dearer than a pair
intact all along.

          The longest and most ambitious poem of the collection, “Little Red Telegram,” about Smarty Jones and his rise to fame in the 2004 Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, uses the line, “Smarty Jones was a freak; that was why Liz loved him” to rally the poem and prevent it from losing its pace and tension. Levin also employs various colors and historical references, as in these lines:

He was a little red telegram sent to folks
going nowhere fast, who drank to their demons,
whose kids were in Iraq dodging roadside bombs,
who were trying to hang on to hobby house marriages
and disappearing jobs in sales and internal auditing.

          Levin knows her craft, but isn’t willing to obscure her knowledge with abstract subjects that won’t connect with her readers. These poems all connect and hold universal appeal; each of us has lost a sock, felt confounded by a jigsaw puzzle, cheered for a race horse, or believed that a horoscope could be accurate. Ever the optimist, Levin finds the light and possibility even in tragic endings, telling us, “if only all farewells were happy,/ this world not too beautiful to leave.”
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