John Levy, Guest Book for People in my Dreams. Cobourg, Ontario: Proper Tales Press, 2024, 150 copies.

propertalespress@gmail.com

This production from Proper Tales Press (published by Stuart Ross) reminds me of some of the first chapbooks that I saw in the late seventies and early eighties with its hand-drawn cover and untrimmed pages.  That Levy lives in Tucson, Arizona also makes it different; most chapbook houses here only publish Canadian writers but Proper Tales doesn’t care about such boundaries. 

I can see why Levy’s poems appeal to Stuart Ross, as they have a clear, seemingly plain style with no interest in language that elevates or obscures.  They are very much of the moment (sometimes even being dated), feel almost conversational, and have more than a touch of playfulness.  Let me say outright that they appeal to me, too.

In one of the place and date-stamped poems (we also get the temperature, a comfortable 63 degrees Fahrenheit), “La Jolla, Thursday Morning, 914/23,” Levy tells us that he has just remembered that today would be his late mother’s 100^th birthday, interrupting the subject that he had intended to write about, and which he then drifts into (spending an hour watching a lone heron).  It’s interesting to note that the memory doesn’t bring any explicit sense of sadness or prevent the poet from experiencing the moment.  In fact, the poet seems to have (at least in his work) a tranquil, accepting, appreciating temperament.  It’s hard, for example, to imagine someone writing an upbeat poem about Sisyphus but Levy imagines him closely observing with enjoyment the changing shadows on the hill he must perpetually climb.

A couple of poems that I particularly like use the similar strategy of finding seemingly endless possibilities within some small thing.  Here is the first, in which a book collector considers a question in a way that has the effect of both opening it up and shutting down the skeptical interlocutor:

The other poem, “Note to Dag T. Straumsvåg” (whose chapbook I reviewed on June 1, 2024) is a wonderful visual game in which the poet imagines what that floating circle might be: a porthole in a ship, the letter’s dream, a halo thinking about the alphabet, etc.  But Levy doesn’t just leave it there, finding a way to express both the “distance and closeness” he feels with this poet friend he’s never met in person.

There’s a touch of surrealism in a few of these poems although they never lose their grounding.  In the title poem he imagines everyone who appears in his dreams signing a guest book, including his parents who “will write their names // most often”.  Self-Portrait as a Self-Storage Unit is an extended metaphor rather than a transformation.  But I like just as much the more ordinary moments and I’ll end on this one:

…in a poem

I never wonder why I’m

in it, it’s not like those times of walking

into a room and forgetting

why I moved there.