Lyn Lifshin's A Girl Goes into the Woods collects her work into a comprehensive volume, #poetryreview

Lyn Lifshin happens, as poetry does, and publishes so frequently it often the most said thing about her work; she’s prolific. Like an actor who stays busy, or a novelist, Lifshin produces. A Girl Goes Into the Woods is crafted the way a tradeswoman might construct a home.

The poems selected for A Girl Goes into the Woods reflect the breadth and breath of Lifshin’s career. One of the great narratives of her work is about people and the tug of war with their body. Yes, many of these poems are about women, and what it means to have a woman’s body, and Lifshin accomplishes this in great scope. There are Barbie poems, and Madgirl poems, and Ice Maiden poems, and My Sister poems, and Lifshin documents life and human folly in a variety of suites. The openness and sensuality of the opening section, Black Velvet Girl (autobiography) are fine boards of memory, knotted with sensuous lines. Jewishness is explored in such wonderful poems such “Being Jewish in a Small Town” where the speaker  "keep a/ Christmas tree in/my drawer..."  and the theme is doubled and mirrored throughout the volume, about the Holocaust, and about small town consciousness. But her poems are not limited to women, or femaleness, they are about human nature.

Lifshin changes costumes like a well seasoned thespian and is a confident crafter of scenes. Nuances of poetry’s first cousin, theatre, such as character and scenery, is not often well yielded by contemporary poets, but Lifshin understands the power of the suspension of belief, and the fourth wall.

When Lifshin isn’t creating characters she expresses the daily grind of living. Take “April, Paris” for example, from the Isn’t it Enough How it Slams Back (what you can’t erase) section, where the speaker plays with Paris cliches, cafes, rain, smoking, pastries, but Lifshin, instead of writing about Paris, is writing about age and sex and our expectations of both, “I wish I could feel/what she must,dolled up,trying to soothe this/man and getting off on it.”  Lifshin has a gift for capturing the balance of sex and death on our human bodies, and our more delicate psyche. The poems where the speaker is remembering a mother’s or lover’s slow decline illuminates the human condition; our bodies betray us, and they become old and flabby and flatulent, yet still capable of cruelty, jealousy, and lust.

Going Home and Looking for the Lost Voices spoke to me as a reader and as a poet, perhaps their elegiac tone and wintry landscapes stood out to my ear. Gale of the Sun, Angels Don’t Fly (place) also struck me as particularly strong. And that’s the only problem with reviewing A Girl Goes into the Woods, Lifshin’s whopping vision. I’m wearing my reviewer’s anxiety on my proverbial sleeve here, dear reader, because I really try to connect to the writer’s intent and A Girl Goes into the Woods is a massive collection, 365 pages of poems (396 if you count front and back matter) and no review can capture the totality of the experience.  Reading a book of poetry equates to several returns to reading the poet’s breath as it is arranged on the page, and this volume is one that lovers and newcomers to Lifshin’s work will return to again and again.