Out of the Desert
June 27, 1981
OUT OF THE DESERT, poems by Diane Levenberg. Doubleday, $7.95.
These poems talk so directly about one woman’s experience of love and pleasure and pain that it’s possible to read them through again and again and still be stirred with each turn of feeling. In “Friday Night,” evoking “Russian music . . . challah crumbs,” Levenberg moves us, in dimmed Shabbas lighting, from a childhood meal of love and acceptance to trying “to escape this 5,000 year old/tradition in a grimy bar/the only connection to my Friday night/is that I’m still drinking wine.”
