Story & Bone, by Deborah Leipziger, from Lily Poetry Review Books
In her newest collection
of poems (Story & Bone, Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), Deborah Leipziger
explores all the ways in which she intersects with her world, and thus helps us
all understand the ways in which we intersect with our own. She reveals herself
as daughter, mother, lover, friend; as baker, gardener, poet; as Brazilian,
American, Jew; but most of all as human.
Skillfully reusing phrases and images from one poem to the next, so that one page seems to echo the ones before, Leipziger reminds us of the rhythms and patterns in every life. The most notable example of this is when she speaks of her family’s story of ancestors concealing valuables as they escaped from tyranny: in one poem, “gems into the hems”; in another “gems sewn in hems”; in a third: “gems faceted by stone hidden in garments”. She then calls the very story into question: “Or is it legend / I sing the fiction and non-fiction”.
Or again with multiple
references to her own dangerous birth: “I celebrate my survival / from the umbilical
cord / wrapped around my neck”; and then, “the umbilical cord coiled around my
neck”. She then multiplies the echo through the umbilical connection between
herself and her twin daughters…and further by drawing the comparison between
her own blue complexion at birth and the color of the walls in the room where
she gives birth. Echoes upon echoes.
There
is an almost breathtaking sense of intimacy in this work, a fearless
willingness to share herself with the reader, body and soul, as in:
“I celebrate my nimbus of curls
nipples neck navel”
“I open myself and claim my
openness
I transform and sing
my Evolution”
“I enter with offerings –
Pomegranates and honey dates,
All that I will be is here.
Entering.”
There is an
earth-mother-like quality in the way she shows us a day of making lemonade with
her daughters (Lemonade), or compares the act of picking apples in an orchard
to that of motherhood itself (Apple Orchard), or when she provides the most
spiritual and open-hearted recipe I’ve ever seen anywhere (How to Make a
Challah).
Every page seems to glimmer with its own light, but for me the most sublimely luminescent moment comes in How to Help a Friend Mourn, which opens “For this you will need lemons” and then explains:
“Maybe you won’t have time to grow a lemon
tree
but you have planned for this moment,
this is why you’ve grown a lemon tree.”
As in her earlier work,
there are many floral images here, and when she puts the phrase “A half truth /
to say I painted flowers” into Georgia O’Keefe’s mouth it’s clear she’s
speaking of her own poetry as well. Sometimes a calyx or a spadix are more than
the parts of a flower.
All artists strive to
make their audience feel something. Leipziger succeeds triumphantly. You will
feel her warmth and her wisdom; her strength and her vulnerability; her love of
life and her deep understanding of both its pain and its beauty. This is a
truly lovely book.
