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Poetry Dynamo Lyn Lifshin

© Kay Day

The most published poet in the world today,
Lifshin shows here with this book what many
literary magazine editors have known for decades:
she's a poet of substance, range and invention.
--Small Press Review

Any serious poet knows the name Lyn Lifshin. Lifshin the legend, Lifshin the dynamo, Lifshin the poet whose work turns up, words pared like apples cut into perfectly sized pieces. Robert Frost described her poetry as having "very good images," and advised, "Bring me more poems." The San Francisco Review casts her as "...frighteningly prolific and utterly intense. One of a kind."

That she is. This trim woman with the long blond hair and dark penetrating eyes has written over 100 books and edited four anthologies of women writers. She has published in virtually every poetry and literary magazine in the nation; she has given more than 700 readings at places like Cornell, Dartmouth, and The Shakespeare Library. Winner of the Jack Kerouac Award, finalist with the likes of Maxine Kumin and Philip Levine for the Patterson Award, Lifshin has made it in the world of poetry, the one she both picked and created.

Lifshin's focus on poetry began in elementary school. "I had a wonderful third grade teacher who had us reading Milton, Longfellow, Blake. I copied a poem of Blake's out and showed it to my mother. I said I wrote it. She ran into my teacher." Lifshin then had to write a poem that was really her own. "That is one way I started," she says, adding, "but I also loved poetry, read a lot-and when I left graduate school and took a job, though I was also painting, I began writing-poems just seemed natural."

The "natural" aspect of her poetry follows Lifshin to this day. I find her poetry like a silk dress, with threads so fine and light, you almost don't even think of reading the lines requiring effort, because they flow so smoothly. One of my very favorite poems by her is, "The Daughter I Don't Have"(Cold Comfort). She speaks of a daughter awakening in the middle of the night, describes emotions that capture maternal essence with lines that are tight, yet thickly textured:

... I part her
hair, braid her
to me as if to
keep what I can't
close, like hair
wreathes under
glass in New
England.

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