There are a few extraordinary poems in Bobbi Lurie's second collection, Letter from the Lawn. For instance, in the third part of "What We Remember May Not Remember Us", Lurie writes,

The plain loneliness of painters.

Their lust for colors
and the underneath of it.

It was Modigliani who saved me
from the dark unknowableness.

It was Soutine.
It was Cezanne.
It was the yellow and green of it.

Lurie's evocation of Cezanne with the mention of the two colors is deft. The poem is especially poignant because Lurie is also a visual artist; the cover of the book features Lurie's art.

Also consider how Lurie concludes the poem, "The Radical Poet Grows Increasingly Famous At Sunset," with this devastating couplet, "The worst thing about living alone/Are the left over potatoes on the stove". In this image, Lurie carefully deploys the emotions of loneliness and isolation. The final poem of the book, "And the Shoes Will Take Us There in Spite of the Circumference," is about a mother and a son who has been diagnosed as unable "to enter/the vast circumference of the universe." This phrase demonstrates Lurie's care and attention to writing about the different ways that people experience the world. Her close observations are illuminated further in these lines in the same poem about the mother's reaction to her son,

I bend down, hold him so tight in my arms
So tight the green trees
So tight the blue and distant distant
Shape of my epiphany (were it half round, half yellow)
My son's small body, his heart pounds against my chest and this world
Of detritus and oblivious footnotes

At her best, Lurie utilizes extraordinary images in combination with fanciful leaps of the imagination. Within these examples of Lurie's poems, however, are the limitations of this collection as well. In particular, the poems of Letter from the Lawn are not all polished and complete enough to be included in the collection; the diction and syntax across the collection are uneven; and, while the collection reaches for a structural arc across it's pages, the structure ultimately falls short of being fully realized.

Revision is the constant obsession as well as challenge for poets. It cannot be done too much, and when it isn't done enough, it is obvious. Further revision of "What We Remember May Not Remember Us" would have removed the word "unknowableness" from the poem. What did Modigliani save the poet from? It is unknown, but for the poem to be fully realized, it must be known, and it must be communicated to the reader. Another simple language problem is in the third example above. One line reads, "So tight the blue and distant distant." The repetition of the word "distant" in that line should have been revised to provide language more precise, descriptive, and evocative. Some of the poems in Letter from the Lawn are only a few revisions away from being solid contributions to the collection; others are too weak to be included in any way. It is challenging work for a poet to cut weak poems from a collection, but it is necessary.

The diction and syntax across the book are also uneven. This unevenness is manifest in small and large ways. For instance, the second and fourth poems of the book, "Weeding" and "Only at Dusk is it Possible to Love the Landscape," employ slashes syntactically; these slashes, however, are not utilized throughout the book, and so their meaning and significance in these early poems are unclear. Lurie also uses capitalization inconsistently throughout the book. This, of course, is fine for poets to do, but in Letter to the Lawn the changes in capitalization seem capricious and lack a unifying principle. Thus, they distract from the reading of the full collection.

Finally, there is a structure in the book. Six shorter poems area set off within the collection almost as if signifying different sections. Some of these shorter poems are strong and compelling, individually, but, taken as a whole, they do not cohere or serve an overall structure in the book. Therefore, these poems do not carry their separateness or convey their structural intentions. It is a gesture to a structural arc, but the gesture alone is not enough.

Ultimately, these deficits interfere with the success of Letter from the Lawn. It is sad because the strong poems in the book deserve a stronger collection. While all of us feel a rush to have our work out in the world, sometimes the best thing for our poems to do is sit on a shelf, marinating. Lurie is capable of writing strong, fully realized poems. Her second book should have waited until she had more work to make the collection full and complete. Fans of Lurie will enjoy the strong writing nestled within this volume, even while they yearn for a volume with the strengths that Lurie is capable of assembling.