Sky Burial

Dana Levin

“Death is the new and unshakable lens through which I see,” writes Dana Levin about Sky Burial. Levin’s harrowing third book is an urgent investigation of human impermanence that explores Tibetan Buddhist burial rites and Aztec human sacrifice while constructing a personal mythology of death, lamentation, and rebirth. In this alchemic dissection of the mourning process Levin locates the nerve where grief resides, and she makes it resonate with beauty. Sky Burial serves as a convincing testament to the intensity of one of our most exciting poets.

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ISBN: 9781556593321

Format: Paperback

Letter to GC

I say most sincerely and desperately, HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Having rowed a little farther away from the cliff
Which is my kind of religion
Adrift in the darkness but readying oars
How can there be too many stars and hands, I ask you

—

I would be disingenuous if I said “being understood” is not important to me
Between the ceiling of private dream and the floor of public speech
Between the coin and the hand it crosses
Mercantilists’ and governors’ and preachers’ alike
The imagination and its products so often rebuff purpose
And some of us don’t like it, and want to make it mean
I would never shoot you, even if you were the only meat around

—

Anyway, snow-bound sounds gorgeous and inconvenient
Like the idea of ending on the rhyme of psychics and clients
Though I too privilege the “shiny”
And of course, I want to be approved of, so much
Despite the image I’ve been savoring, the one of the self-stitching wound
Yes, I want to write that self-healing wound poem, the one with
                cocoon closed up with thorns
We are getting such lovely flourishes from our poets
Fathomless opportunities for turning literacy into event
It’s the drama of feeling we find such an aesthetic problem,
                these days

About the Author

Dana Levin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022), a New York Times Notable Book. Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly …

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Reviews

“Levin’s aching but restrained third collection is an attempt to quite literally come to terms with the deaths of loved ones (“The father died and then the mother died / And you were so addicted // to not feeling them, you told no one about the clamp / inside,” writes Levin). To find the terms she needs, Levin (Wedding Day) hunts in some very far-flung places, including Tibetan and Aztec rituals, Wikipedia, correspondence with close friends, “the symbol book” and the University of Tennessee. These poems are alternately cryptic and crystal clear, though Levin says, in the stunning “Letter to GC,” “I would be disingenuous if I said ‘being understood’ is not important to me.” Of course, what language we can find for grief is often ambivalent and complex, as these poems attest. Levin delves into esoteric mourning, burial, and religious practices—”They weren’t really gods, they were / ‘emanations'”—resurfacing not so much with answers as, to paraphrase Frost, momentary stays against confusion. She finds little in the way of lasting comfort, but much permanent poetry.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Sky Burial brings a wealth of rituals and lore from various strains of Buddhism, as well as Mesoamerican and other spiritual traditions, but the intensity and seriousness and openness of her investigations make Levin’s use of this material utterly her own, and utterly riveting.” —New Yorker

“In Levin’s hands the fragment becomes a tool of regeneration and self-understanding. It’s as if the very idea of the sentence has to be rethought from the beginning.” —Boston Review