Monks' Fruit
- Publisher
- Nightwood Editions
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2004
- Category
- Canadian, General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780889712027
- Publish Date
- Mar 2004
- List Price
- $14.95
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Description
In his debut poetry collection, A.J. Levin presents a world in which the past overlays our modern existence, where classical allusions and philosophical observation are married to slapstick humour and carnival: Plato is a blues singer, Tantalus is a prospector in BC, and Descartes wanders around a Montreal amusement park. Monks' Fruit is above all a work of faith. Redemption lies in humour, imagination, curiosity and knowledge, though not in organized religion: Lazarus is reborn through his love, even extinct species have a second life when we remember them, but a parking lot is death itself.
Levin guides us not just through time but through place-a cramped Istanbul apartment, brown Mexican fields, noisy Toronto restaurants, and through England, Brazil, the American South. And everywhere is a "place filled with the poem / of human architecture," a land made real by the ability to love and remember.
About the author
A.J. Levin was born in Winnipeg during a Halloween blizzard. He has also lived in Montreal, Mexico, and Oxford, England. He took a BA at the University of Toronto and an M.Phil. at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and served as the Junior Dean at St. Cross College. He is the author of two chapbooks, and now lives in Toronto, where he works as an editor.
Excerpt: Monks' Fruit (by (author) A.J. Levin)
CRABAPPLES
All yesterday morning the birds
were dancing around the Dominican
orchard, singing through crabapples,
just on the far side of my place.
You live on the close side, north-
west, but never too close. Dance
with me in the fallen monks' fruit;
alive like sparrows, and the blue-
yellow birds the perverse Anglais
call tits. We'll mock the Blackfriars,
steal bougies at Notre Dame, and
pelt the Virgin of Guadalupe
right in the watermelon: hail
Mary with them, true right
to the touchdown line.
But they hail Mary when
there's no hope left.
I want to share a pulpy past,
a seven-year-old's crabapples.
And the tangy, fibrous
future with you.
MONOPOLY COFFEE SHOP
Ten years since I saw your brown hair
last, at the interview I thought I flubbed.
You were through the thick glass of
the Monopoly Coffee Shop, grey
March afternooning with your cousin.
Of course it was I who recognized,
long after last repeating your name
with my lower brain. Your jaw
fell a sycamore's mace: Him, did I
once see a leer through his phone voice?
We traded you look goods but you were
shorter, more righteous, leaving for
an arid seminary to study the obscure
ancient art of not loving. Your breasts,
once famous pears, had shrunk a decade.
The anonymous note, yes, that was mine,
N. helped me write the willow-tree poem.
In Israel there will be few orchards.
I did not ask for your overseas number,
happy to see your tongue if only once.
WORLD'S LARGEST CABBAGE MOTH COLLECTION
for Vladimir Nabokov
Once engrossed he picked a flower,
was hound-and-foxed through the rest of childhood,
trapped by bigger boys more white than his mute skin:
netted by hands, pinned against brick schoolyard walls.
Still when they danced the flick knife on his neck
as if to prick and suck the life out
there was always something
desperate, fluttering in their eyes.
They too needed him,
and he held on to this,
even in February when they packed
fairy-tale white snow into his underpants.
Now his vengeance is clinical, Roman:
he pins to pleasant-smelling wood cases
the formalin-soaked specimens
of the world's largest cabbage moth collection.
LETHE
After his futile CPR
I thought nothing enough.
Even hard to eat shivah veal
some neighbour kindly prepared.
Instead: in my hands
I find your gifts, a rain,
it reminds me there was
some use, loving my brother.
And reading in
your young paper eyes
(never twice the same
colour) a cherry-tea memory
of a past boy,
I want even more
to embrace you. Not to stop
you running but the Lethe.
Editorial Reviews
"Levin often stumbles into joy and his surprise delights both him and his reader."
-Bill Robertson, The StarPhoenix
The StarPhoenix
"...this is a book of lil' gems, and more important, unexpected turns. It is like a conversation with a person who is in a hurry and needs to get the facts to you. Some people try and explain things to you. Levin talks you. It's worth the listen."
-John Stiles, How Yah Doon?
"Not only does this enchanting collection of poems defy expectations and adventurously experiment with stanza forms and syntax, but it knows how to be funny, too."
-Heather Fawcett, The Peak
The Peak
"Polished, elegant, and honed to a thrilling exactitude, the various strengths of Monks' Fruit lie, to identify but a few, in its evocative command of the exploded landscape of the heart, in its willingness to take worthy risks, and in the way it leaves readers hungry for more. What a talent!" -Judith Fitzgerald
"Monks' Fruit revels in language, syntax, and allusion. This crab-wise approach gets thrown in the pot along with a genuine sorrow at circumstance, and weariness with the intellect's downgraded predicament; what's boiling over in this debut is a humane love, and a love for humane acts, appropriate to our culturally frightened Present. Some of Levin's poems have a cubist's mania about them that can only lend itself to fresh insight."
--Ken Babstock
"The poems are cleverly allusive and are worth their
weight in chuckles. At the same time, you can see that
it isn't all tongue-in-cheek, that there are issues of
faith at stake... [A] good variety of colour and texture... You feel that the poet is always winking and
conniving: 'what next thing can I say that you weren't
expecting?' One appreciates that."
-Jeffery Donaldson, University of Toronto Quarterly
"[a] divine poetry collection ... Monks' Fruit is as irreverent and shining as its cover ... the poems have a maturity that comes only from patience and hard work ... He keeps his subject matter grounded with stellar lines ... Levin has a wry raw humor, with hints of Charles Simic ... Levin's priests are a drunken joy, his verses constrained as corsetry, his outcomes full of earthly bombast held together with tiny glimpses of heaven. Monks' Fruit is faithful to all it sets out to be, (i.e. a keeper)."
-Emily Schultz, Broken Pencil