92 Rapple Drive by Lyn Lifshin

92 Rapple Drive
Lyn Lifshin
Coatlism Press 2008
15.95 ISBN 13: 978-0-9802073-1-6
ISBN 10: 0-9802073-1-2
http://www.coatlism.blogspot.com

the font used for titling the poems is distraction;
too emphatic for this reader, especially, in the
morning before my coffee kools. I proceed anyway to
the poems which run into each other or so it seems,
“imagined I couldn’t go on without her.” “here, with
the cat on my feet…” “was it the black starless
nights,.” Lyn Lifshin’s 92 Rapple poems are rooted,
they grow from rich soil fed and turned regularly.
what surprises me is the poems are not about trees or
those flowery blouses dotted with pink and lilac.
instead Lifshin plants memory and the moment opens; we
meet the unabashed poems’ presence, in the presence of
their unfolded. “but I was fire, i was adrenalin,
flame. I wanted the white wind…” and as the reader
thumbs thru, turns pages, we harvest her white, we
breath in and exhale slowly in front of, before her
verse, before we are allowed entrance, “the key
gulped by crows,” the reader needs to retrieve, settle
into, an often “cranky.” Lifshin lets us walk thru
concrete passage ways, the subtle play between
couplets. those who have read her work before, you’ll
find the same genuine voice, that pause encounter,
"remember stories of panthers,” pawed rows and rows,
spooning words as ordinary, the extrodinary lift, the
fresh break or corner of shade.

I don’t want to talk
of the other I passed
in the hall, you know
that story tho it was
not quite that, was
tea in bed and then I
wrote in the kitchen.
what was new
would be stained.
what wasn’t, lost
its sheen. days a
scrim I saw only
what I made up thru,
the moon pink and
if there was a pond,
a deep rose thru the
sand that let go of
everything too

Irene Koronas
Ibbetson Street Press (reviewer)
Poetry Editor
Wilderness House Litery Review
www.whlreview.com