Description

Field Notes from an Illusion

by Lois Levinson

Enter Field Notes from an Illusion, and you will find memories that ride on steam from a cup of tea, a melody that’s gotten stuck in your brain, the loss of a beloved bookstore, moving mountains made of sand, an ancestor climbing out of her photograph, the slow erasure of a mind, even a house taken back by a waiting forest. Though life offers a balance of illusion and reality, poetry invites us to break free and take a new look at the illusory, the fantastical and the what-if and to toss it all around in our imaginations and on the page.  Lois Levinson’s poems ask us to explore the diminishing and endangered through the lenses of reflection, moonlight, decay, misperception, imminent loss and hope.

Enjoy a Video of Lois reading from the book:

Early Praise for Field Notes from an Illusion:

Lois Levinson’s strongest poems hinge on moments of perception, occasions for bringing the world ever more into focus. Her studious-but-playful gaze falls on what she loves and lights it up: mule deer antlers are ‘moon-silvered,” a coyote’s “well fed and swaggering like a senator,” bluebird eggs seem “Insubstantial as rings of blue smoke suspended in air.” But Levinson understands that we are finally as insubstantial as what we study; her melancholy negotiations with the fact of limit lends her seeing a poignant urgency.

—Mark Doty, National Book Award-winning poet

Poems of observation. Poems of witness, revelation. Poems dedicated to the exploration of habitat and human history. This collection challenges us to measure the vastness of Earth: first light to night sky; canyon’s knife-edge to grassy high plains to mountain peaks; dew to whirlwinds to storms. Rich in images both lush and precise, it asks us to consider the ways we connect with it’s many life forms: Listen closely for the song of birds; take notice of a mule deer or the “boastful arias” of coyotes; speak the language of a beloved family dog. In the same powerful way, Lois Levinson also attends to the complexity and challenges of being human—the various aspects of the evolution of family and its rich history. Through these lyrical narratives, Levinson connects with both the heart and mind as she mourns the many losses on a planet quickly being depleted of resources and verging on the ominous extinction of species, all of which forecast how the Earth might shrivel to desolate wastelands. It is also a poetic journey layered with hope of future possibilities; if nothing else, a wish for waiting forests to once more overtake this place we call home.

—Madelyn Garner, author of Hum of Our Blood

About the Author

Lois Levinson has had several careers: as a middle school teacher of French and English, as an attorney practicing commercial litigation in Denver, and, more recently, as a poet.  While she pursued each profession with passion and commitment, she has found true delight in writing poetry. A graduate of the Poetry Book Project, a two-year advanced program at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, she published a chapbook, Crane Dance, followed by a full-length book, Before it All Vanishes.  For the past nine years, she has met with her poetry group, the Wyrd Sisters, to study poetry and to workshop and rejoice in one another’s poems and publication successes. She lives in a suburb of Denver with her husband Mark, their adult son Daniel, a Goldendoodle named Molly, and an African Grey parrot who answers to Kiri.