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"Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee
The winner of the 1999 Booker Prize is a bleak tale of human and animal misery in post-apartheid South Africa.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[11/05/99]

Ivory Tower
Beyond facts
Can one teach spirituality in college?
By David Alford
[11/05/99]

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The code ahead
Simon Singh, author of "Fermat's Enigma" and "The Code Book," talks about once and future cryptography.
By Margaret Wertheim
[11/04/99]

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"The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age" by David Rains Wallace
The fury of two paleontologists tells us much about the temper of the late-19th century. Unfortunately, the book is a slog.
By Thomas Hackett
[11/04/99]

Get Uncle Sam off my back! and other misguided impulses
American government-bashers like to wrap themselves in a constitutional flag. But Garry Wills argues that the Founders wanted a strong government, not a weak one.
By Gary Kamiya
[11/03/99]

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By Melanie Rehak

Nov. 5, 1999 | Some years ago, a friend of mine received a letter informing her that she was being included in an anthology of America's best young writers. Shortly thereafter, she received a second letter telling her that, based on her age (which had initially been miscalculated -- she was in her early 40s), she was no longer one of America's best young writers. The committee was sure she was still a good writer, just not a young one.

I have to admit that, though I found this story funny (as my friend did, too -- luckily) at the time, I didn't fully appreciate its implications. Barely an adult myself, I had no real thoughts on the advantages of being a young poet -- I had never been anything else -- or on the pitfalls of being undeveloped. I didn't know what might be missing from work that didn't have the weight of years on it.

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder By Jan Heller Levi Louisiana State University Press, 90 pages Poetry Buy Once I Gazed at You in Wonder by Jan Heller Levi Dailies and Rushes By Susan Kinsolving Grove Press, 88 pages Poetry Buy Dailies and Rushes by Susan Kinsolving

Recently what might have been missing has arrived in several gorgeous books that are known, unfortunately, as "late debuts" by women. But "late" is a misnomer. Collections like Jan Heller Levi's "Once I Gazed at You in Wonder" and Susan Kinsolving's "Dailies and Rushes" couldn't have accrued any faster than they did without irreparable damage to their wisdom. These two writers make a case for the clear-eyed, unsentimental vision that belongs to poets who know enough about life not to be fooled by it, but not too much to rule out a spiritual existence altogether.

Take, for example, the luminous closing passage of Levi's "If We Could Speak to Death, What Would We Say?" -- the final poem in a sequence about her mother's death:

____________... and this
___is poetry:

______not beauty, not order, not burden, not legislation, but
______consciousness,
______the dream of dreams,
______the only connection between fathers and daughters,
______generations,
______the woman rocking you to sleep
______and the woman who sleeps.

___(I say: How is my mother? Does she need anything?)

The idea of wanting to come face to face with death may be a juvenile one, but Levi mitigates its cartoonishness by accepting her own weakness. She has traveled far enough to know that order disintegrates at such pivotal moments -- that, as she puts it, "we have infringed too far on God's authority/and this is His remaining power over us;/that there is no God." In the end, her mother's comfort matters more than anything else. Even though Levi is powerless to help, or even to make herself heard, she asks the single, unanswerable question she must ask.

Levi's poems draw great strength from this impulse, as it plays out in various arenas. She is relentless in her questions and challenges, yet a sublime, breathless quality prevents them from becoming obnoxious. In "Get This," she spins an incantatory tale of her own evolution:

___I did not get this from any book ...

___I got this on trust and betrayal, I got this on trust
___I got this on trust funds
___on loan
___with interest
___I got this from inhale inhale inhale
___exhale exhale exhale

___I did not get this from blood, blood
___means nothing, I did not get this from nature
___or nurture ...

___I got this from mind that muscles
___outmuscles heart ...

___I did not get this from any book come into my library
___said the spider to the fly
___open any book
___it will tell you I did not get this from it
___even if I burn it I will have this
___even if I burn it
___even if I burn.

In other words, she is self-made and will continue inventing until the end. Elsewhere Levi becomes wistful about the disintegration of her marriage, and once again, what from a younger writer might have been a sentimental gush appears here as memory made to glimmer ever so slightly by a fine patina of sorrow:

___The night before,
___in a cold car,
___you held him while he cried. The heart does break.

___You can see it in a man's shoulders.
___They go up and down, up and down.

What a simple formulation -- "The heart does break" -- to encompass a truth we all know but often articulate so poorly when our turn comes. And the solitary gesture of shoulders heaving in grief is so visceral that it says almost more than one can bear. There is no artifice here, only quiet emphasis: Levi has been there, she has seen it and she puts it down on paper. It takes years to learn how to step away from the page so elegantly.

Next page | A poet smoldering within