Man Overboard: New and Selected Poems by Michael H. Levin

“…for openness is all the earth we have…”

Before clouds close and darkness rules, Michael Levin directs his eye towards gloomy spots and illuminates them. His pen is a painter’s brush, creating transparency with unexpected depth.  His work transports me to the essence of moments in different times and places, with unusual clarity.  Following him I walk through landscapes and moods, sharp-edged forms and fading contours.  I breathe new air — and smell it.  I sense vividly the spaces he conjures — be it the wide space of Chile’s fateful immensity, or the tiny cramped space of an emergent Hitler’s bathroom, narrow and angry.  Each time I read these poems, new paths reveal themselves.

–Katrine Suwalski, international jazz musician, composer, band leader and music educator, Copenhagen, Denmark (www.suwalski.dk)

Michael Levin’s poems are a captivating collection of dramatic slices of life netted over the course of decades. Rhythmic, accessible passages read like colorful murals, describing tastes, sounds, and visions in sensual tones and longings, connecting to intimate relationships with people and places he has known or imagined. This book was like an elixir. It soothed during a time of great stress.

–Gail Prensky, Executive Producer, Meteopa Productions (http://meteopa.com/about-2/); Founding Director and Executive Producer, The Jüdische Kulturbund Project (http://www.judischekulturbund.com/), Washington DC

In Man Overboard you’ll relive the mopped antiseptic floor of a grandfather’s assisted living facility and the harried white-shoe squeak of a son’s ER stay.  In these 29 mostly short poems you’ll also visit the Valley of the Kings. Laguna Beach, and a young Hitler shaving.  Most of all, Michael Levin’s fresh descriptors and flowing line will carry you to a moment — a moment of acknowledgement, different in each poem but similar in their power to strike sparks.  Engaged readers might remember Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.” That line acquires new life here.

–James Herbert, Director, Research and Education Program, National Endowment for the Humanities (ret.), Kent Island, Maryland

Levin’s poetry circumnavigates the globe like a time-traveling Indiana Jones and sticks a shiny fork deep into earth’s volcanic heart. Family poems coexist with others about Pompeii, Marilyn Monroe, John Ashbery, Hitler, Oxford, and the Royal Tombs of Ur.  It’s an omnibus, and Levin is the tour guide, MC, and conscience, balancing repetition and internal rhyme — the compass to plot our course and bring us back alive.

–Richard Peabody, Editor, Gargoyle Magazine (http://www.gargoylemagazine.com/gargoyle.php), Arlington, Virginia