Phillis Levin's much-anticipated sixth collection, An Anthology of Rain, is a stunning series of poems immersed in time while acknowledging "How it is / Is not how it is / It keeps changing." Yet the fleeting presence of so much in this lyrical collection is what the reader is gifted. In poem after poem, memories are stirred to become as palpable as the present in this poet's keen imagining. Even a remembered duel of roses between friends and across languages is itself a cause for delight, as is the vision of a father returned to life to assuage the poet's grief. Light and water are the twin elements that course through these poems, whether it be the "[b]lighted light" of a leaf turning in early fall, or the "orb of light" (a water droplet caught in her father's hair) that entranced the poet as an infant, or the drop of rain in the brilliant title poem, "An Anthology of Rain" that invites the reader to follow its movement and receive the rain that "receives you." Such a spirit of reciprocity between poet and reader animates this collection and is a poignant reminder of what the best poems offer: that thrilling sense of immediacy even in the face of flux.
Phillis Levin was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of five previous poetry collections, including, most recently, Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Winner of the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. She has been awarded residencies to the American Academy in Rome, Bogliasco, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry London, Raritan, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Levin has taught at the University of Maryland and New York University, and is Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Hofstra University. She lives with her husband in New York and West Cornwall, Connecticut.
"Phillis Levin's poetry has been characterized over the past thirty years by an astonishingly consistent excellence. She has written, again and again, across a half-dozen books, poems that are precise, feeling-full and piercing, elegant, informed and aware of the world, and rich in the kind of profound play that is a hallmark of real art. She's been a central figure, an important and admired figure, in the poetry community. She has a loyal and wide fan base, and she possesses every marker that would indicate a writer's capacity to break out into new levels of cultural presence, and to command broad attention. She is widely known, deeply admired as a wonderfully authentic writer." — Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet
"The poetic line so at ease within its boundaries that motion and stillness compose a single music. Rhyme (cumuli, passersby) and all-but-rhyme (visitor, meander) so cordial in their modulations they might be the products of nature rather than art. As only supreme artistry can achieve. Phillis Levin has long been one of our purest masters of lyric form, and in this ravishing new collection she bids us welcome to a realm of solace and enchantment. Sorrow and loss and foreboding are here as well - how could it be otherwise? - but in the company of a mind like this, one might almost believe our world could remember the contours of peace. I will keep them close, these beautiful poems." — Linda Gregerson, Former Chancellor, Academy of American Poets
"In this stunning new collection, An Anthology of Rain, the insightful observation of Phillis Levin is at its full power. Elegantly understated, there's a lyric intensity here that reminds us of how closely beauty and heartbreak can co-exist. Whether she trains her eye 'on a black cloth, a line of chalk' from a painting by Moroni in Italy's Cinquecento period, or, within this century, 'on a black wave, gentle, thick as night' in her father's hair, we learn how to see the world around us with a freshness that feels vital now, when too much can both be overlooked and yet longed for. Like many of her poems over her impressive career, these poems reveal what we needed to see—not simply around us but within us—all along, 'as if breaking a spell.' Yeah, that's 'how it is.'" — A. Van Jordan, Prizewinning Poet and Professor, Stanford University
