Novemberly by Lyn Lifshin. (E.S.P., 28 pgs.) $10.00

Lyn Lifshin checks in with her one hundred and somethingth volume of poetry. Novemberly, though a slim volume, encompasses much of the ground of Ms. Lifshin's past work ( e.g. female relationships: mother-to-daughter, sister-to-sister, self-examination). While I don't believe this is Ms. Lifshin's strongest effort (with a hundred and somethingth volumes of poetry under her belt, that would be difficult to manage), I do believe this chapbook provides significant evidence as to why she remains the "Queen of the Small Press."

When I am forced to defend Lyn Lifshin -- usually against a cranky rejected, wannabe poet who imagines that Lyn and every editor who publishes her is part of same vast poetic illuminati conspiring to keep those cranky, rejected wannabe poets down, I often try to explain her realness to them -- that no one writes like her. In some ways, it's as if Bukowski raped Plath and out of that unholy union, Lifshin was born. Yet, while she seems part of the literary bloodline of both those writers, she's much more deft at her craft than Bukowski and has more steel in her bones than Plath. It's in the final poem in this chapbook that I think she best expresses her approach to poetry:

" . . . When the spiritual gush, does
your skin crawl too? Those
Pollyannas you could never be,
forget the mystical. And when they
end their e-mail with "life is good
and it gets better every day if you
think it is," don't you just
want to go and take a bath?"

While, "Spiritual" is not really the best poem in this volume, it does present a perspective about life and poetry, I happen to share. The preceding poems in this volume embody this philosophy. Most of the poems concern Ms. Lifshin's relationship with mother, her mother's failing health and subsequent death. My own personal favorites include "Maybe, but It Feels More Septemberly," the title poem, "If I had a Daughter," and "Why Do I Remember the Girl." Her poems are earthy, honest and deal with her own past without sentimentality or platitudes. She finds her metaphors in everyday things and experiences — in plants, boxes, butterflies, quilts and the change of seasons.

— reviewed by JCE