IN THE SURGICAL THEATRE / DANA LEVIN

Frank Bidart has remarked of the poet David Matias that he wrote as one in the grip of a story. In Matias’s case, the story was AIDS, its power simultaneously destructive and generative.

The remark can be adapted to describe Dana Levin’s first collection. For story substitute image: at the book’s center (and reaching into all the surrounding material) is the surgical theatre, an image, like Plath’s bees, metaphorically fertile, its manifold resonances revealed through Levin’s extraordinary and demanding intelligence. The danger of such powerful figures is the danger of lesser imagination, imagination content with the first circle of revelation. What in such a smaller talent might have proved repetitious, banal, self-glorifying, is, here, the heart of an astonishing book.

The richness of its center derives from ambiguity: the raised scalpel—healing that looks like assault. A healing, an assault, aimed, often, at a baby, so that the hovering knives become at once an image of salvation and the first impression of a lethal world. The recurring figure has the feel, or, more accurately, the force of biography, of lived experience. But it is biography wholly transmuted into metaphor, which is to say Levin’s experience (whatever it is, whether she is patient or surgeon) is life not simply lived through but thought through: the authority of the real combined with the larger evocativeness of imagination.

     Do you know if you want it? Is that jumble of spit and bone

so worth it

     that you would go down again and be

a body

     raging with loss, each beat of the heart

like the strike of a hammer,

     spiking the nails in, to feel, to feel—

I learned this from you, Father, all my life

     I’ve felt your resign to the hurt

of living,

     so I came up here, to the scaffolding above

the surgical theatre

     to watch you decide.

Can you go on with this mortal vision?…

—“IN THE SURGICAL THEATRE”

The book begins, though, in disturbing tranquility:

     The assistants lift him gently,

gently. For a moment, the one lifting under his arms

     is in the attitude of an artistic

sorrow—It is

     the Deposition, the taking down of the god.

In the stillness of death, there is activity. Less violent than the scalpels of healing, but more assured as to outcome:

     When they’ve gone, Debov sits watching. He imagines

the sheath of bacteria he knows is there, incessant, biological,

     seeking a way in. They push and gather

at every pore, but the flesh is sealed—

     His doing.

Soaking in the vat of embalming fluid, Lenin looks restful,

     meditative, a high official in his bath

in his dacha, far away

     from the controlled air of the mausoleum …

—“LENIN’S BATH”

Characteristic is the massive weight of both passages, so unlike the peculiarly substanceless mass of much contemporary poetry, the mass of the reiterated indeterminate. Nor is this the inquiring, elastic capaciousness of the note-taker, the generous gatherer. Rather, this is mass as dense accrual of detail around particular ideas, ideas sufficiently magnetic or profound to allow detail to adhere in varied ways.

If the shape and manner of these poems owe something to Whitman, the temperament is less affable, its luminous, mortal, ecstatic reach closer (among Americans) to Crane. But scale here is less purely expansive, more corrective: Levin’s animating fury goes back deeper into our linguistic and philosophic history—to Blake’s Tyger, to the iron judgments of the Old Testament.

Her syntactical signatures are two. If syntax reveals, more deeply than any other formal element, the style of a poet’s thought, then Levin’s art owes most to, is closest to, these earliest masters. (Though it is also true that readers can hear only echoes of what they themselves have read.) But surely there is something of Blake in Levin’s driving imperatives and urgent repeated questions, and something of the biblical in her savage moral intensity:

oh doctor, angel, person healed,

     do you think this is grandeur, to see myself

as an avatar of healing,

     to see in the sick child the fever of the world,

and to say to the people in the distant air

     circling and circling, like planets caught,

the fires of their own

     history’s wreckage, Come down

into the burning,

     feel it,

so you can not live it anymore.

—“PERSONAL HISTORY (V)”

Such questions and imperatives make up a syntax of insistence; its proliferating clauses, animated by a need to refine, to amplify, crucial perception, have nothing in common with ornament. This is the language of the prophet: Levin’s art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive. How remote this art is, in its scale and seriousness, from most of what surrounds it, from what could be called the ambitious minor, with its polished self-consciousness: on one end, the depressingly flawless small lyric, and on the other, facile amplitude, its very pointlessness promoted into philosophical exploration.

Also at odds with contemporary habit is Levin’s refusal to identify herself by gender. She writes sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a man (often simply as a human soul):

     … —this green

brightness—

     like a stage lit up in a ring of dark trees, where he has come

with a stick of birch, where he has come

     to not have a body—

And later, in the same incandescent poem:

     He knows the names, from his brother’s textbook,

calyx, lepidoptera, labia, clitoris, he’d thought

     they were beautiful,

as he spreads the pictures down on the ground, his eyes slow

     as a tracing finger, he’s a boy,

he will have this body,

     what will he do now with the beautiful names.

—“THE BEAUTIFUL NAMES”

Current American literary life being what it is, a well-documented and scrutinized arena (the audience made up almost entirely of practitioners), a lit trail from the MFA programs through the multiple journals, it is rare to encounter so substantially, and for the first time, so mature a gift. Formed, complex, learned: but where was it through those nervous earlier stages, when we would normally have been watching it, speculating about it, ministering and judging?

It was an extraordinary experience for me, to discover this talent entire, in a book. Nor can excerpts give any sense of its scope, its music, the poems’ tidal power:

     To say, I hurt—

     To say, The heavens are empty—

     To say I hurt, the heavens are empty, the streets are empty,

          beer cans scatter, the click and tink of their tinny bells—

     To say there is a Dark Age grasping for light, extending its bent

          hands back to the other one, which had striven and striven,

     while this one doesn’t even know

          it strives—

     And to say, The sirens are advancing.

     And to say, It’s 1999.

     And to say, My gas bill is late.

     And to say, There is no lover.

     And to rise up to the stove and pour the water in the cup,

to watch the tea stain it,

     while mercury opens his doctoring wings and hovers

at the edge of the ceiling,

     to cocoon you,

to give you a stage—

—“THE WORK (IV)”

Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels.

1999