Praise for Leza Lowitz's Third Book of Poems

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	• 100 Aspects of the Moon Leza Lowitz Printed Matter Press, 2005 - 119 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Praise for Leza Lowitz's Third Book of Poems

Published by Printed Matter Press, Tokyo, 2005.
Paperback, 120 pp, with a Foreword by Donald Richie
ISBN: 0-935086-36-6 U.S. $15.00, 1,500Yen (Japan)

Among the many memorable lines in this elegant, passionate book are these: "this is what transformation looks like--/ the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life." One Hundred Aspects of the Moon tends to center in the perception of a crossing, a sudden awareness that some monumental change has come upon the self. Yet the book is anything but nostalgic: everything in it struggles to accept change--or at least to see it with renewed clarity. Lowitz writes that the moon has not only a "hundred" but thousands of aspects. These poems are about the mind's amazing ability to perceive "itself" at exactly the moment when the "self" is least stable: the moment of change. One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is a rich poetry of awareness in motion, awareness of motion. One poem asks, "What would you save if your house were burning down?" Lowitz--like Cocteau--would save "the fire."

--Jack Foley, Poet and Host of KPFA Radio's "Cover to Cover"

"Just as the moon reflects the sun's light, Leza Lowitz's poetry reflects a life fully lived, illuminating transformations of various kinds. Informed by wisdom both ancient and contemporary, Eastern and Western, this book reminds us that the impulse toward creative renewal is what helps us to thrive in whatever dark corner of the psyche, or the world."

--Kim Addonizio, Author of "The Poet's Companion" and "Tell Me"

Leza Lowitz is that rare poet who stays focused in the clarity of the mind's "now," whether she is immersed in the natural beauty of the northern California shoreline or contemplating Old World architecture & its ghosts of sorrowing geniuses & martyred innocents. This is a woman with an exceptionally fine-tuned mind who is not afraid to listen to all the ambivalent nuances or her own thought & to share them openly, as if the reader were her best friend. Lucky we all are to have her new collection.

--Gerald Nicosia, author of "Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac," and "Love, California Style: Selected Poems."

From the Foreword by Donald Richie:

"O," sings T.S. Eliot in "The Wasteland," "the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter and her daughter," the ellipse of the "o" echoing the shape of the orb reflecting the light of the spent sun down on Mr. Sweeney's friend and her child.

Though Eliot himself was echoing Marvell and hence relaying reverberations of all those higher things for which the moon once stood, this use of the lunar orb to merely illuminate a pub plebian and her offspring also indicates more common, more modern uses for its light, particularly when he informs us in the next line that, "they wash their feet in soda water."

Whatever else it is, this peculiar activity is quotidian, an ordinary and apparently daily activity. This too, says Eliot, the moon illuminates. Not only the chaste and the classical, the mystic and mysterious, but also the mundane.

The mundane is secular, typical of this world, concerned with commonplaces, indeed, quite ordinary. But it is this ordinary quality that is also precious, and it is this which Leza Lowitz celebrates in her poetry. Here the moon has many seasons, takes many shapes, but what it shows is the daily reality of the poet. The light etches her concerns and at the same time illuminates her metaphors, creating a lovely lunar landscape of the mind.

This poetry uses icons as ancient as the moon itself, but it is morally modern. Undisturbed by common faith, it is assured in its moral weight. Assured and assuring. These statements of things as they are, illuminated by the steady light of experience, make extraordinary the common. Here, Lowitz lavishes us with the sparkling ordinary, pure and precious precisely because it occurs every day, every night--shining there above us, just out of reach.

(c) Donald Richie
Tokyo, Japan

About the Author:

Leza Lowitz has received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry, among many other honors. Her work has been broadcast on NPR and NHK, and has appeared in Harper's, Ms., ZYZZYVA, The Japan Times, The Broken Bridge, An Inn Near Kyoto, 100 Poets Against the War, Prairie Schooner, and many others. She is the recipient of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature, the Tokyo Journal translation Award, and literary fellowships from the NEA, NEH, and California Arts Council. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry. She currently resides in Tokyo.

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Poet's Note: "I wrote many of these poems in the year I was turning 40. I wanted to mark a passage, to commemorate a life cycle shift. Over the past fifteen years I'd birthed many creative projects into the world and it was the moon, the Goddess Luna, the feminine embodiment, which spoke to me and inspired me."

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