Review of A Tide of a Hundred Mountains

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A Tide of a Hundred Mountains. Richard Levine.
Treadwell, NY: Bright Hill Press, June 1, 2012. 64 pages, ISBN: 978-1892471697

Many poets strive to marry aesthetic demands with a social conscience.  It is a difficult marriage that many are only occasionally successful at.  Richard Levine is consistently successful at this difficult balance.  This is true of his earlier work as with his current collection, A Tide of a Hundred Mountains.

This collection takes on the problem of how our desires betray us and often also betray the object of our desires.  In the wake of that problem, the collection tries to find a way to reconcile us to those we love in spite of that betrayal. 

The collection opens with a short, beautiful poem, called “Snowball.” 
 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The boy making a snowball
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .does not know his life
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .will one day be like this.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .In his hands, turning,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .compressing, turning,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .compacting, hefting,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .until his fingers grow so cold
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .fingering objects of desire
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .he cannot feel what he holds.

And thus the issue central to the collection is established.  It surfaces again in multiple poems and in numerous shapes.  For instance, it is the background in the amazing poem “In a Blue Wood,” an ekphrastic poem based on a painting by Van Gogh.  After observing the painting, how the couple in it “walk toward light,” the speaker begins speculating about them,

. . . . . . . . . . . .The couple cannot think of any good
. . . . . . . . . . . .ever coming from anger, so they are more happy
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .than not.

A little farther on, it says

. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . perhaps they are only now on their way to the
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .place
. . . . . . . . . . . .where they will become lovers.

But it is, as I said, speculation.  The poem concludes,

. . . . . . . . . . . .Of course, we can’t know any of this.  Perhaps, even
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .Van Gogh
. . . . . . . . . . . .didn’t know anything about them: so many unseen
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .possibilities
. . . . . . . . . . . .lived in a blue wood, so like ours.

The distance between Van Gogh and the subjects is as great as the distance between Van Gogh and us as viewers of the painting years in the future.  All we cannot know is contained in the potential desire, for if we, like Van Gogh, did more than push beyond the merely observable and given, beyond, say, the fact that they “walk toward the light,” the act would strip the moment down to the raw nerve that is our loneliness. But that’s what the speculation throws us back on: the attempt to be together.  The speaker says of his own speculations,

. . . . . . . . . . . .That could be true.  Maybe I want it to be
. . . . . . . . . . . .true of me, of us.  And like us, they may have worn
. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .paths
. . . . . . . . . . . .to the most forest-deep secrets in each other’s lives.

What does he want to be true?  That “they are more happy than not.” 

The next poem in the collection is about a couple arguing and the disconnection within the larger frame of common responsibility.  “At It” concludes,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .We drown and accuse,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .moored to some proof

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .that it was the other who failed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .to make the bed we made together.

It is this shared responsibility that begins to grow in the collection and, whether it is our shared roots in the earth, our shared social context, or our shared time in this life, there is a common community below the discords that implies a need for forgiveness.  An example is the poem “Disturbing the Peace,” which confronts the difficult issue of the disparity between those who have fought in war and those who have not.  Through its pains and affirmation of the intimate ties between those who share the violent experience of war, the poem concludes,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Then,
. . . . . . . . . . . . it was Steve and me, the jukebox jazz,
. . . . . . . . . . . . and the barroom full of people
. . . . . . . . . . . . with their own stories to tell, a few, no doubt,
. . . . . . . . . . . . fueled by drink, going beyond what can be said
. . . . . . . . . . . . without disturbing the peace.

The poem affirms the commonality of a privacy too deep for common revelation and it is this, in fact, that binds us.  It recalls Proust’s insight that the personal is universal.  And this kind of tie, this commonality is what the poems seek at their core again and again.  In one of my favorite poems, “In Place in Mud,” it concludes,

. . . . . . . . . . . . And when that time rises, like a moon
. . . . . . . . . . . . trawling a tide over a beach,
. . . . . . . . . . . . what songs will the shells you leave
. . . . . . . . . . . . teach seekers from generations and stars
. . . . . . . . . . . . beyond to sing amid the retreating spume?

Our presence echoes into the future; what will be the lesson your presence leaves to future generations?  This is a question about the bed we make together. 

Happily these poems are as aesthetically pleasing as they are thematically interesting.  Levine is keen to pick up assonance and he is playful and even joyful in his use of internal rhyme.  In the lines above from “In Place in Mud,” not only is the internal rhyme of beach/teach evident but the prevailing assonance of the long “e” glides through many of the lines while being quietly held together by the remote kinship of moon and spume.  Or, more overtly, his music in “In a Blue Wood,” shines where

. . . . . . . . . . . .   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The horizon
. . . . . . . . . . . . at the couple’s back, between the trees, is black.
. . . . . . . . . . . . They walk toward light.  Crowds of waist-high
. . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . flowers,
. . . . . . . . . . . . on thick-leaved stalks, sing in stout slurries of pink and
. . . . . . . . . . . . white.

Levine is a jazzman at heart and the kind of rhythmic fluctuations and surprises found in jazz are found in Levine’s poems.  Like jazz, they are deeply felt and powerfully articulated, surprising and moving at the same time, while probing the deepest parts of our humanity.