The term “May Day” can signify a celebration of winter’s end or a call of distress. Or perhaps, as in the case of Phillis Levin’s book, these meanings exist simultaneously. There is destruction and fear within the pages, yes, but also acknowledgement of the repetitious nature of life and the constant renewal.
I must admit to being misled by the title and the cover of May Day; initially, I naively envisioned a book full of forests and creatures and sunlight. But Levin’s book isn’t nature poetry; it is poetry. Nature appears, but only as a thread woven into a much larger project.
Individually, the poems of May Day feel independent and complete; each moves through its situation carefully and precisely. For example in “Inchworm,” the poem comes to a satisfying close with, “Inchworm / Hugging a slender trail, / Scaling a sliver of time / From which we dangle, / Are you the true measure / Stretching across the divide?”
However, the unity of individual poems doesn’t necessarily translate to a comfortable unity of the book as a whole. When taken together, the poems can be unpredictable and unsettling. The book challenges its readers to look for ways everything fits together. This is not a concept book where the poems rely on proximity to each other for meaning. Some poems call on classical references while others rely on news events and even the phenomenon of “news” itself.
May Day forces its readers to constantly shift scenes and focus. Early in the book, nature imagery plays a primary role, though it is overtaken in the middle by poems more urban and human-centric. The last third of the book is a mélange of nature images, human forces, and considerations of repetition and time. Seemingly, it is this focus on time, repetition, and remembrance that holds the key to the book.
Whether examining an acorn or watching a man walk down a hallway at night, May Day is concerned with the process of existing and repeating and remembering. In poems that subtly deal with war and terrorism, George Santayana’s saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” lurks in the not-so-distant background. The references to ancient stories and artifacts also ask readers to consider the past and what it means to the present. Do we want to remember? Do we even want to know what is happening around us now?
After considering these weighty questions, Levin allows readers to glide out of May Day’s pages with three beautiful poems in which clouds touch, trees touch, and someone on the edge of sleep asks the other to, “‘Keep Reading.’” Despite the harsher moments May Day asks its readers to consider, one fact remains clear: Levin’s lyricism balances the load.