An Anthology of Rain: Poems

Phillis Levin's much-anticipated sixth collection, An Anthology of Rain, is a stunning series of poems immersed in time while acknowledging "How it is / Is not how it is / It keeps changing." Yet the fleeting presence of so much in this lyrical collection is what the reader is gifted. In poem after poem, memories are stirred to become as palpable as the present in this poet's keen imagining. Even a remembered duel of roses between friends and across languages is itself a cause for delight, as is the vision of a father returned to life to assuage the poet's grief. Light and water are the twin elements that course through these poems, whether it be the "[b]lighted light" of a leaf turning inearly fall, or the "orb of light" (a water droplet caught in her father's hair) that entranced the poet as an infant, or the drop of rain in the brilliant title poem, "An Anthology of Rain" that invites the reader to follow its movement and receive the rain that "receives you." Such a spirit of reciprocity between poet and reader animates this collection and is a poignant reminder of what the best poems offer: that thrilling sense of immediacy even in the face of flux.

Phillis Levin was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of five previous poetry collections, including, most recently, Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Winner of the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. She has been awarded residencies to the American Academy in Rome, Bogliasco, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry London, Raritan, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Levin has taught at the University of Maryland and New York University, and is Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Hofstra University. She lives with her husband in New York and West Cornwall, Connecticut.