92 Rapple Drive - Softcover
This new collection of poetry is a sexy, personal account of what happens on Rapple Drive. Lyn Lifshin takes you inside--behind closed doors--for an intimate look where most people never see. The poems are powerful, sensual and evocative.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Lyn Lifshin has written more than 100 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A., and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. She has given more than 700 readings across the U.S.A. and has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell University, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Huntington Library. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction "Queen of the Small Presses". She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey, and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as "a modern Emily Dickinson".
Review:
Ernest Hemingway famously stated that I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Lyn Lifshin is a minimalist, slice of life poet in that same long and strong American tradition of spare realism. In Lyn s poetry, the images do not convey meaning. Rather, the images are the meaning. When she states that geese / were black ovals / against lightened gray we do not have to search for a meaning or a symbolic resonance but rather close our eyes and picture the black ovals and the lightened gray. --Alice Pero
Ernest Hemingway famously stated that I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Lyn Lifshin is a minimalist, slice of life poet in that same long and strong American tradition of spare realism. In Lyn s poetry, the images do not convey meaning. Rather, the images are the meaning. When she states that geese / were black ovals / against lightened gray we do not have to search for a meaning or a symbolic resonance but rather close our eyes and picture the black ovals and the lightened gray. As our earthly encounters with sensual experience have meaning for us, Lyn s poetic and beautiful images have meaning and speak to that basic human core where we can not help but read the world in sensual symbolic images. So, the symbolism in this poetry is deep and human rather than facile and literary. Fine, but that is only the start of the wonder of these poems. In this new book, we have a poet with the amazing ability to bring bright, wafer thin slices of life into deep symbolic conversation, but she also talks explicitly about her own life. In these highly personal poems, we see a woman who remembers her lover s fingers and now has grown beyond embarrassment into the fullness of experience of the good and comfortable as well as the violent and awful that fill all of our lives. What I mean here is that I responded strongly to the narrative element in these poems, the disjointed memoir of a woman who has seen the wine bottle break on the wall and wonders if the stain will bleed through, a woman who wants peace and a warm blanket by the fire, the fingers of an imaginary lover, a cat purring softly in the corner; but has felt the thistle in the garden and knows that the cat is already diabetic, sick and facing that same challenge we all face as time speeds up and we are whirled around the sun year after year in our living rooms and yards. This is a fine book by a mature and gifted poet. I am not unbiased, as I am a long time admirer of Lyn s poetry but, for the reader that wants to walk into the life of the poet and see the spinning seasons through new eyes, I suggest 92 Rapple Dr., a fine collection by a poet who is an American master. --Norman J Olson
Lyn Lifshin s new collection, 92 Rapple Drive (Coatlism Press, 2008) Lyn Lifshin likes to make the world disappear. For those who hold tightly to their solid, carefully appointed universes, her poems might be a source of irritation as she challenges the very foundations upon which we stand. She, like the best magician, will show you the card, but you cannot notice the sleight of hand as it fades away. We do not know where 92 Rapple Drive is, but within its mysterious walls, whole lives come and go with a whisper and a wisp of wind. Those of us who have read much Lifshin recognize the characters: the woman pretending to be a wife, the mysterious email lover, the spurned lover, the dying mother, the cats. Yet these characters seem almost incidental to the disappearing act. The stage is set in the first poem, before anyone in my/life was in my life/not the cat,/the man s fingers,/blackberries tangled/under blood maple/tangle weed grazed/ankles and trees.... The poem has occurred before the poem was written. We go into an alternate time/space. It ends, shapes, moving in/shadows could be/whatever you imagined. The poems can be violent; a wine bottle is thrown, blood is spilt, a pregnant woman is murdered, yet still the blows are softened by this shape-shifting out of reality , by making things not enough or not remembered or put before or after time. A series of blues poems, starting with The Bad Bad Bad Bad Blues are more hard hitting, rhythmic, full of blue images, not just the/inky sapphire,not/the cobalt the blue/eyes crying in /its rain but the/black cat blues,/the cat jolting out/of bed the kill,/blue of sarcoma.... But each one of these poems has a way of avoiding the inevitable ending , slipping off into only half/way there blues, blues that have not fully arrived, blues we have to look for because there were more blue than/there were words. Lyn Lifshin s prolificalness is legendary. Here is a bright spirit burning with poetry. Like Anna Pavlova, who brought the swan alive, Lyn is a streak of adrenaline dancing that does not burn out. Her magic is that she can appear and disappear without a trace. Her poems will fill us with color and then let us drift away in the mist. But the creative muscles of this writer are that of steel and this is the true irony. A poem titled, December 29, 2005 could be an autobiography: with the windows open, the white orchard A woman darts toward the melting, leaps past soap and towels, Not afternoons, long slowly drowsy paragraphs but an exclamation point, a wild sentence and the fire and plum coming into the sky These are the real colors and this is the life of the poem, which is also the life of the spirit. We are fortunate to have this sublime poet leaping to us with her wild poems. --Alice Pero
Ernest Hemingway famously stated that I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Lyn Lifshin is a minimalist, slice of life poet in that same long and strong American tradition of spare realism. In Lyn s poetry, the images do not convey meaning. Rather, the images are the meaning. When she states that geese / were black ovals / against lightened gray we do not have to search for a meaning or a symbolic resonance but rather close our eyes and picture the black ovals and the lightened gray. As our earthly encounters with sensual experience have meaning for us, Lyn s poetic and beautiful images have meaning and speak to that basic human core where we can not help but read the world in sensual symbolic images. So, the symbolism in this poetry is deep and human rather than facile and literary. Fine, but that is only the start of the wonder of these poems. In this new book, we have a poet with the amazing ability to bring bright, wafer thin slices of life into deep symbolic conversation, but she also talks explicitly about her own life. In these highly personal poems, we see a woman who remembers her lover s fingers and now has grown beyond embarrassment into the fullness of experience of the good and comfortable as well as the violent and awful that fill all of our lives. What I mean here is that I responded strongly to the narrative element in these poems, the disjointed memoir of a woman who has seen the wine bottle break on the wall and wonders if the stain will bleed through, a woman who wants peace and a warm blanket by the fire, the fingers of an imaginary lover, a cat purring softly in the corner; but has felt the thistle in the garden and knows that the cat is already diabetic, sick and facing that same challenge we all face as time speeds up and we are whirled around the sun year after year in our living rooms and yards. This is a fine book by a mature and gifted poet. I am not unbiased, as I am a long time admirer of Lyn s poetry but, for the reader that wants to walk into the life of the poet and see the spinning seasons through new eyes, I suggest 92 Rapple Dr., a fine collection by a poet who is an American master. --Norman J Olson
Lyn Lifshin s new collection, 92 Rapple Drive (Coatlism Press, 2008) Lyn Lifshin likes to make the world disappear. For those who hold tightly to their solid, carefully appointed universes, her poems might be a source of irritation as she challenges the very foundations upon which we stand. She, like the best magician, will show you the card, but you cannot notice the sleight of hand as it fades away. We do not know where 92 Rapple Drive is, but within its mysterious walls, whole lives come and go with a whisper and a wisp of wind. Those of us who have read much Lifshin recognize the characters: the woman pretending to be a wife, the mysterious email lover, the spurned lover, the dying mother, the cats. Yet these characters seem almost incidental to the disappearing act. The stage is set in the first poem, before anyone in my/life was in my life/not the cat,/the man s fingers,/blackberries tangled/under blood maple/tangle weed grazed/ankles and trees.... The poem has occurred before the poem was written. We go into an alternate time/space. It ends, shapes, moving in/shadows could be/whatever you imagined. The poems can be violent; a wine bottle is thrown, blood is spilt, a pregnant woman is murdered, yet still the blows are softened by this shape-shifting out of reality , by making things not enough or not remembered or put before or after time. A series of blues poems, starting with The Bad Bad Bad Bad Blues are more hard hitting, rhythmic, full of blue images, not just the/inky sapphire,not/the cobalt the blue/eyes crying in /its rain but the/black cat blues,/the cat jolting out/of bed the kill,/blue of sarcoma.... But each one of these poems has a way of avoiding the inevitable ending , slipping off into only half/way there blues, blues that have not fully arrived, blues we have to look for because there were more blue than/there were words. Lyn Lifshin s prolificalness is legendary. Here is a bright spirit burning with poetry. Like Anna Pavlova, who brought the swan alive, Lyn is a streak of adrenaline dancing that does not burn out. Her magic is that she can appear and disappear without a trace. Her poems will fill us with color and then let us drift away in the mist. But the creative muscles of this writer are that of steel and this is the true irony. A poem titled, December 29, 2005 could be an autobiography: with the windows open, the white orchard A woman darts toward the melting, leaps past soap and towels, Not afternoons, long slowly drowsy paragraphs but an exclamation point, a wild sentence and the fire and plum coming into the sky These are the real colors and this is the life of the poem, which is also the life of the spirit. We are fortunate to have this sublime poet leaping to us with her wild poems. --Alice Pero
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherCoatlism Press
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 0980207312
- ISBN 13 9780980207316
- BindingPerfect Paperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages78
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92 Rapple Drive
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Coatlism Press
(2008)
ISBN 10: 0980207312
ISBN 13: 9780980207316
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