LUNAR ECLIPSE by Helane Levine-Keating

Helane Levine-Keating celebrates the tones and textures of outer and inner life—and the vital connections between them.  Lyrical in the main, a number of her poems move well beyond the personal, and in wonderful pieces like “Loon” she transforms what initially appears to be ordinary experience into genuine revelation.

–Charles North,  poet-in residence at Pace University New York, is the author of 11 books of poems, most recently What It Is Like: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point/ Hanging Loose Press, 2011).

This is a fine mature and sophisticated collection. The interlocking themes involve old love remembered and new, seasoned love sensually revealed through rich, sometimes surreal expression. All our senses are engaged by the imagery from the first poem all the way through.  Flora images achieve equivalencies to emotional states: “cobalt cashmere lidding this crimson explosion”; bodily images abound: “a soft tongue”; “the body’s cadences.” In one place the poet says, “the language of bodies does not use words,” but luckily for the reader, Helane-Levine Keating does.

–Barry Wallenstein, emeritus professor of literature and City College of New York, CUNY, is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently At the Surprise Hotel (Ridgeway Press, 2016).

Helane Levine-Keating’s Lunar Eclipse is a map to a strangely beautiful world of love—found, lost, remembered. The very first Poem, “Elegy at Bibémus,” took my breath away with its piercing observations: “. . . by day the boy rode on your shoulders and the sea was / quiet warm and clear as my eyes are now. . . “ In these poems, Levine-Keating embraces the world and everything in it, even that which disappears, in clear and precise language that the reader can’t resist.

–Bertha Rogers, poet and Director of Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, NY.