Public Displays of Affection

This unique book, written while the author and his wife have been moving around the Western USA, is full of references to place names, and flora and fauna of California, which reminds one of Californian writing of the 1960s, when poets, beats, and hippies were hanging out in places like Big Sur, Bolinas, Venice, and San Francisco. That resonance brings a level of lyricism to Leftwich's work. But his writing is very different from those halcyon days, though there is a similarity in the attention paid to common moments and things, a Zen-like attitude. But here, words are often juxtaposed with little apparent semantic relationship, making for phrases and lines that create multiple possibilities of meaning and resonance. In Part One of this book especially, each of Leftwich's "stanzas" are separate poems/ worlds/ perceptions/ and each rewards attention. They are not
"thought", but mirrors of attention, blank minds open - not like the Californian 1960s at all, where such things were talked about but not manifested so much. Leftwich manifests that kind of mind, as in a classical Japanese Haiku sequence. It requires a kind of open and shifting attention of the reader, an attention that does not include any kind of searching for facile instructions about how to live. It is, rather, documentation of an acceptance and exploration of the relationship between mind and world. - John M. Bennett

this week the role of shoes
images of hats and nostrils
insomuch as the map pages
are unreadable illegible
desemantized & repetitive