Mercury
Penguin Poets (April 1, 2001), 96 pages, paperback, 5.5 x 8.4 inches, $16.00
ISBN-10: 0140589287 / ISBN-13: 978-0140589283
From the publisher: In this collection, Phillis Levin offers thirty-three luminous poems that extend her reputation as a master of form and an alchemist of the vernacular. In her work, she pushes the boundaries of sound, syntax, and sense—and ultimately makes structures incarnating the complexity of consciousness and the transfiguring power of memory.
PRAISE
"Phillis Levin’s work is tragic, audaciously playful, and redeeming. She is a marvelous architect and an amazingly moving poet."
—Tomaž Šalamun
"Like the element of its title, Phillis Levin’s poetry is at once weighty, elusive, versatile, and unique. Levin commands many modes but a single and beautifully authoritative and intelligent voice. She is one of the best poets writing in this country."
—Rachel Hadas
"The temperament of Levin’s poetry is both spiritual and philosophical. If the world flashes with epiphany, we must also interrogate it with reason…. At her best, Levin’s passionate engagement redeems the world’s apparent randomness into meaning."
—Robert Schultz, The Hudson Review (from review of The Afterimage)
"Shaped by a metaphysical sensibility that is at once fiercely cerebral and deeply passionate, and that responds to both rigorous logic and spiritual mystery, the poems in Mercury mediate repeatedly between heart and mind, faith and science, the domain of ideas (and words) and the physical world, setting us down inside a restless, relentless mind that, torn between these poles, strives continually against imbalance and fragmentation and for equipoise, harmony, wholeness."
—Bruce Bawer, The Hudson Review