REVIEWS

REVIEW Tasha Pippin

If this world falls apart: Moments of Stunning Intimacy

Lou Lipsitz. if this world falls apart. Spokane, WA: Lynx House Press, 2011. $15.95, paper.

Lipsitz starts his collection off with a group of narrative poems about family, so we read first about the poet’s grandfather, father, mother, son, and the poet himself as a child. Here, we not only feel an early connection to the poet, but unearth some striking images within the nostalgia, especially in “Fishing With My Son on Lake Champlain.” The poet harkens back to his days in a “sun‐flooded rowboat thirty years ago,” the beauty of a northern pike, “fierce and beautiful” mirroring the beauty of the boy and the moment itself, before the “long filament of days stretch[ed] itself across the water,” the “reel let[] out the line:/almost invisible…settling quietly downward.” These early poems seem fitting to start off a collection called if this world falls apart. First, we are seeing and experiencing the poet’s world.

And what sort of world is this? A world in which flickers of observation manifest into a

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delicate mixture of apprehension and wonder at “all those years in front of [us].” A world in which, in junior high, we are climbing a rope: “twenty‐five feet to /the ceiling / of the gym…not knowing any better how / to return to earth / than [we knew] how to ascend,” with a fear of falling but also a wish to leap into the air and discover what might happen.

A world that evades nothing and asks for nothing. A world in which a knuckle ball is like “the startling / crooked spirit of grief.” At times a “mysterious, damaged world,” but one of triumphs. By part two, many of Lipsitz’s poems have moved beyond reflections of past experiences, and on into more collective “we” poems in a lyrical, external style. Perhaps the strongest poem in the collection of this sort is “Unintelligible Words,” whose thematic impression can be seen in many of the other poems. Here, the poet explores the act of revelation itself, “those words that cannot be heard all day” but exist nonetheless, ready, when

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we are, to be heard. An “old song [that] could come to you. / You don’t know why.” This idea is echoed in the “raw, unending poetry / that vibrates through the roots of the day” in “Vacation,” and again in “Why am I Restless?” We sense the poet’s fascination with the unsayable:

…there is too much song, somewhere, waiting and

I cannot breathe it…

“How many days before / the in comes out?” Lipsitz asks. And poets and readers around the world mutter a collective “Amen.” In the beginning, this collection looks backward at moments of looking forward. Later, it looks outward in order to look inward. The results are moments of stunning intimacy. In fact, “Solomon’s Mistake” is the only poem in this collection which to me seems to lack this sense of intimacy, although it is nonetheless well‐written. In this poem, Lipsitz re‐imagines the well‐known story of King Solomon dividing the child in two in order to discover the real mother. Instead of the idea being Solomon’s, the poem casts it as the last‐ditch threat of a soldier after

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Solomon turns the two arguing mothers away. The poem has the opposite outcome of the biblical version and the false mother gets the child. Solomon only discovers this, regretfully, years later, realizing what he could have done. Thus, his “mistake.” But it is hard to tell to what end this re‐imagining endeavors. That is not to call the poem pointless, for there is a clear point:

..it was then, as she wept, that Solomon realized what he could have done so many years before to reveal the truth.

In a flash of despair, he discovered this wisdom— not the effortless solution mythologized by those who prefer the idolatry of kings.

But in a collection with such evocative poems, this point seems a comparatively inconsequential one, with no real emotional crescendo. On the other hand, “Dr. Zhivago’s Desire” also describes a well‐known scene, but, I would argue, more successfully. In this poem, Lara, “carrying the great yearning / the way a river carries the bodies of the dead” and Zhivago, “run[ning] after her, howling like a wolf,” resonate with me as a reader. But most of Lipsitz’

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poems are more universal, and seem much stronger, such as “Sex,”

You’re finished, sad, sullenly dissatisfied, and you get up, trying to be polite, and go home.

You turn on the engine, and music blasts into the car, and you shiver but don’t turn it off.

A true lyric poem, this piece is born in one impalpable instant and expands, like a stone thrown into a pond, rippling outward, resonating. The last lines of the poem carry it immeasurably outward: “It’s a short trip / home. It’s a / short trip.” So what are we to make of that conditional phrase, the collection’s title, if this world falls apart, by the end of the collection? “Variations on a Line by William Carlos Williams” seems to address that very notion, referencing Adam and Eve and their “fall” from the garden. If

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