Loose Magic by Les Bernstein Review by Susan E. Gunter
Loose Magic by Les Bernstein
Review by Susan E. Gunter
ISBN 978-1-64662-673-1
Finishing Line Press, 2021.
Georgetown, Kentucky
Release Date: 11/5/2021
Pages: 160
In her most recent book, Loose Magic, Les Bernstein explores the limits of the human self and its conscious mind, revealing how inadequate our narratives are to explain the mysteries of life and death. Her primary themes concern the profoundly painful loss of loved ones, the passage of time, and epistemology—how do we know what we know? She takes us into her own reality, sprinkling her philosophical musings with pathos and with humor.
This collection of poems is divided into eight sections, the first an invitation into her world with reasoned advice for readers, the second containing cynically comic poems, the third (brief) one with a political focus, the fourth replete with doom, and the last three containing the poems from her three chapbooks: Borderland, Naked Little Creatures, and Amid the Din. The majority of her poems are formally arranged, often employing slant and internal rhyme; these formal elements are artifices that offset life’s inherent chaos. Her key tropes include mystery, magic, spirit, time, stars, dust, the past, memory, history, and the opposition now/then. She alternates between shadow and substance, her own version of Plato’s cave allegory, sometimes referencing dream worlds and at other times evoking our unalterable human condition: mortality.
Most of the poems in Loose Magic are primarily regular in form, arranged in stanzas of similar length and making frequent use of slant, off, internal, and occasionally perfect rhyme. In “Revision,” for example, she uses “ignites” as an end word in the first stanza, then a slant rhyme “grit” at the end of the second stanza, and then ends the poem with the word “white.” So we have fire—then dirt—and finally everything burned to white, perhaps white ash, possibly suggesting that revising a poem resembles a conflagration. Her formal devices have the effect at times of lulling the reader into complacency; then she often interjects a turn in the poem that takes us off guard.
In “Dottie,” a poem about an older woman whose life is nearly over, Bernstein repeats a line three times in the penultimate stanza: “time repeats itself / time repeats itself / time repeats itself”; and then she gives us the turn in the very last line, a brutal commentary on the end of life that follows these regular verses: “as if it matters” (85). Occasionally she effectively uses consonants and sound correspondences to stop a poem’s flow, to make us stop and pay attention, as in “invite farcical pratfalls / avoid hard labor’s invitation to bruise” (2). Life may be mysterious, even unknowable, but the poet offers us a sort of reassuring platform for viewing it, as she knits each poem together carefully.
As we read, we fall under the magical spell this poet weaves. She begins with the circus, a metaphor for our lives, the tight rope a reminder of “the only certainty . . . gravity’s triumph (1). She gives us psychics (“the psychic said / he had made contact with my mother” (5) ) and “the caravan of loose magic” (6). In another poem, “thickened dreams / drift magic” (109), offering the poem’s narrator a respite from life. We have subtle magic, rough magic, unassailable magic, and everyday magic. In the title poem, she imagines a world where such magic might exist:
………….with tinkling bells
………….cargo straining at the seams
………….the caravan of loose magic
………….dreams into town. (6)
But the poem ends with the caravan moving on. Later, a grimmer poem concerns her loved one’s search for cancer cures. Here she evokes a “wormhole of magical thinking” (54), using the phrase “magical thinking” twice in the poem, almost as a talisman. Perhaps her poems themselves are another form of magic.
This is a rich multi-layered collection of poems. Bernstein’s is a poetry of complex abstractions. The phrase “shadow and substance” forms another trope in the poems, suggesting: what in this life is real and what are only emanations from our own conscious minds? The fundamental nature of reality sometimes seems unknowable, a chimera that eludes the narrator. Several times she references “this one for certain life,” as she searches for something “more than a countdown to nothingness” (4). She searches for “one enduring livable truth” (125). She suggests that we stand at the edge of an unknowable universe, “below / the threshold / of detection” (73). In one poem humans are at sea, “adrift in place / below sun and moon” (47), our lives dreams that wax and wane like the moon. We are “outside the knowable” (45), perhaps in a cave that keeps a real world out.
Many of her poems are elegiac, love letters to her lost beloved ones, primarily her spouse. She asks over and over why loss is the price of love. Life for this poet is a dance, but it is a dance haunted by the shadow of the unknowable she so frequently references. As for Emily Dickinson, death is a primary topic for Bernstein, the final ride she has had to watch others take. She offers no answers for death’s mysteries, only beautiful poems that reveal how the loss of loved ones transforms us. The word “mystery” appears over and over in this volume. For this poet, “whirring specks of time / unfurl a wordless backstory” (138), acknowledging the fundamental futility of trying to capture the deadly march of time in language. Time itself writes, but it scribbles with air and “is scribed with erasable lines” (136). Her loved one’s death is an “unsayable absence,” “unfathomable,” as she “can only try to understand / the inky infinite that brackets life” (121). In her final poem “At the Edge” her dead gather in dreams to speak to her. Theirs is a “love story.” And, in perhaps her most surprising turn given the dark nature of most of the poems in Loose Magic, she leaves us with a modicum of hope:
………….while at the edge of awareness
………….accommodating angels
………….play with contradictions. (140)
Susan E. Gunter, Ph.D., is a Professor of English Emerita. She has held three Fulbright scholarships, teaching poetry in the Balkans. She was a Fellow in American Literature at the Harvard Libraries, 2004-2005, and a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities recipient. Her poems have appeared in national journals in America (Atlanta Review, Louisville Review, Paterson Review, Poet Lore, and dozens of others), Bulgaria, England, Montenegro, and Sweden. Her poetry reviews have appeared in American Arts Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, and the Harvard Review. In 2020 she won second prize in the California State Poetry Society. www.susanegunter.com
Les Bernstein’s poems have appeared in journals, presses and anthologies in the U.S.A. and internationally.Her chapbooks Borderland, Naked Little Creatures and Amid the Din have been published Finishing Line Press. Les is a winner of the 6th annual Nazim Hikmet Festival. She also was a Pushcart Prize Nominee for 2015. Les has been the editor of Redwood Writer’s anthologies for 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 and also the editor of the Marin High School Anthology 2018.
27 April 2022
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