Before It's Light

Lyn Lifshin, Before It's Light: New Poems (Black Sparrow, 1999)Lyn Lifshin is one of those poets who just keeps getting better as she gets older. She spent years, it always seemed to me, trying to be a sort of imagist Bukowski; she outgrew that a ways back and rounded into her own style. Her work since has gained a rare and delicate power, and with every passing book, it gets more all-encompassing.There are few words to say about Lifshin that have not already been said; I'll just let the images speak for themselves.Now cliff swallows nest in the mud where the Sinaqua lived until water ran outHigh in these white cliffs weaving yucca and cotton How many nights did they listen for cougaras they pressed the wet rust clay into bowls that they walked200 miles to trade in Phoenix before it was time to leave("Arizona Ruins")Pure, simple image, with all the power vested inside, and no annoying blocks of message to dilute the power of the words. Lifshin reiterates her worth of being placed alongside Hayden Carruth, Ira Sadoff, and the rest of the modern poets who will someday make up the canon. An easy entry on this year's best-of list. **** ½

Lyn Lifshin is an impressive talent whose poetry ranges from simple mood pieces to complex narrative imaging. Before It's Light: New Poems is an impressive anthology that clearly documents her as a major talent. At The Pond Early: night grass steams./Mourning doves in/the fog, a few feathers//on the lawn though no/gees for two days./Only the heron like//a slate candle, a drift/wood stick and my/17 year old cat, a//cloth mouse in her jaws muffing a shriek,/cuts the sleeve//of quiet

I love Lyn Lifshin's poetry -- I have for years and years. She's a genuine original and a true maverick. This book is special -- Lifshin at her finest. Definitely read this if you love sensual, edgy poetry.

After finishing Lifshin's latest book of poems, I felt as if I'd lived a thousand years and travelled a million miles. The gamut of human experience covered in "Before It's Light" runs from the innocence of childhood through the slings and arrows of maturity, and unveils almost everthing, divine or evil, that can possibly happen in a human life. Lifshin weaves an enchanted fabric from a stark realist's thread of narrative. A "Must Read."

The number and variety of Lyn Lifshin's poems is astonishing. The array of experiences dangles one between humour and horror; between the goofy and the sublime. One relives the hallucinative horror of a Nazi death camp, yet is able to escape back into a world of eroticism and whimsy. Lifshin is the genius of her time and place!