Billy Mills reviews John Levy's To Assemble an Absence (2024)

Irish poet Billy Mills was good enough to provide the first review for John Levy's To Assemble an Absence (2024) as part of a group review over at his Elliptical Movements. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Mills writes:

John Levy’s To Assemble an Absence is just the kind of pamphlet I love to get; simple but attractive saddle-stitched, with a dozen poems spread over 17 pages of text representing a report from the front-line of Levy’s work. The absence of the title is, in the first instance, the poet’s late mother:

Mother, I keep trying.

In the title I say “an,” not
“Your.” You

titled me.

This concern with the precise word used, even, or especially, at the level of articles and pronouns, is typical of Levy’s method; he is a poet of small nuance for whom words, and their absences, matter.

Note to Dag T. Straumsvåg (May 5th, 2024)

There are plenty of words
that you will not find

in this note to you.

Let’s imagine pairs of them
on see-saws

around the world, in playgrounds

There are poems that mark both parents’ support for Levy’s early poetry, the lack (or absence) of a sister, and other intimate aspects of family life,  but Levy’s lens widens out to include a broader view of lost childhood:

Raining in Tucson

Rain fills the hollow toys in the front yard of former friends. That was years ago, when they weren’t former friends. That rain has been distributed now, by processes that existed long before toys and our lives, distributed far beyond Tucson, beyond Arizona. Maybe some of the rainwater in the plastic dump truck, for instance, has joined the ocean off the coast of Madagascar, near Sambava. I can still see the faded yellow plastic of the dump truck’s bed, near the dull red of the cab. That toy is surely in a landfill now. Buried deep, never again something a raindrop hits first.

From which I infer that absence is also part of the process; the past can never be recovered, but it can, in some sort, be recalled in words if, like Levy, you have that gift.