Christmas Show

by Harriet Levin

Overview

Harriet Levin is a wonderfully courageous and exacting poet. . . . [Her] poems will attract many readers. —from the Introduction by Eavan Boland

Beginning with the stunning title poem about her younger sister's brutal rape, Harriet Levin juxtaposes the ordinary with the terrible in this powerful collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807068373
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	05/31/1997
Series:	Bernard New Women's Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.24(d)

Editorial Reviews

If, as Housman once claimed, poetry is that which makes your hair stand on end as you read it, then Harriet Levin's The Christmas Show is poetry. . . . Her poems call to something deep within us. In truth they haunt us with their very human witness. —Paul Mariani, author of The Great Wheel

"Early in her powerful new book, The Christmas Show, Harriet Levin, with stunning tenderness, says about the long-term damage caused by the horrifying rape of her sister: 'But this / is how my life is different from my sister's, / I have not been forced to struggle for it.' But she is wrong. She has struggled honorably with her sister's pain and the pain of others, and out of her struggle she has brought this passionate and eloquent book." —Andrew Hudgins, author of The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood

From the Publisher

Levin is one of a group of emerging female poets in their late thirties who "tell the story of their nation through the lens of their sexuality," according to Eavan Boland's preface to this prize-winning 1996 collection. (Levin is the latest of several noteworthy writers to be introduced by Barnard's New Women Poets competition.) Contemporaries will recognize the signposts of this particular coming-of-age: sexual violence, drugs, and family difficulties in a world that had barely begun to acknowledge the existence of these problems among the middle class. The title poem describes a sister's rape, which occurs while the speaker is off seeing the Rockettes perform the Christmas show at Rockefeller Center. Others depict a brazen passivity that begins in adolescence: "I'm still as lost as I was in those days,/ hitch-hiking on the Schuylkill with Linda/ on the way to her shrink appointment." While her short lines can degenerate into prosy explanation, one impressive piece, "French Movie," expands the line length and the point of view into a moving piece on divorce. Recommended for all contemporary poetry collections.Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., N.Y.

Library Journal