Flavours
by Lori Levy & Neil Leadbeater
54 Poems ~ 73 pages
Price: INR 200 ~ US $15.00
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
ISBN: 978-93-6354-031-6
To Order: Amazon.com
Reviewed by Michael Escoubas
In my youth, The Sinorak was a popular smorgasbord restaurant, in Bloomington, Illinois, and my family’s favorite Saturday night eating place. For $2.50 per person, one could partake of a luxurious outlay of foods typically found in the Prairie state. There was caviar, not typically found in Bloomington, (I didn’t like it). My favorites included a humongous pile of shrimp-on-ice in a clear bowl and prime rib sliced to order by a chef dressed in a pristine white coat, wearing an 18-inch chef’s hat. Every comfort food known to man graced a table that went on for miles. Or so it seemed to my ten-year-old kid’s perception. All of this affirms that writing a review of Flavours by Lori Levy and Neil Leadbeater is more fun than work.
Lori and Neil comprise a collaborative team whose combined talents form a cord of three strands: poetry, food, and life.
Part I: Lemons, Eggplants and Chocolate Chip Cookies, features twenty-two poems by Lori. Fittingly, she dedicates her section To all the cookie lovers in my family. Both poets are graced by a droll sense of humor; I sensed humor suffused in each poet’s writing. Both poets are good with titles. Several by Lori caught my eye: “The Glass Half Full,” “What I Learned from My Neice,” “Her Father and His Sardines,” and “After Grocery Shopping with My Mother-in-Law.” In this excerpt from “The Glass Half Full,” my tastebuds discovered palpable joy:
See the glass half full, we are told,
not half empty.
I will try. Here is a glass. I begin to fill it
with the scent of jasmine from my walk today
and a few squirts of juice from the lemons and loquats
hanging within reach. I add the taste of my daughter’s
roasted asparagus, as well as the rose water, saffron,
and pistachio flavors of the Persian ice cream
I am served for the first time
As the poem continues, Lori leads me into a deeper purpose of her poem: her husband’s arm reaches her, bringing her close … her granddaughter giggles uncontrollably when Lori staggers trying to walk like a model. This is family life, a glass half full, or better yet, full to overflowing. Lori affirms …
I could add more, but perhaps it’s enough
for one day, the glass already half full,
a potion of joy, pure, unfiltered,
no trace of bitter or stink of toxic,
no lumps of disappointment spoiling the taste.
I will drink it now.
Watch me glow, drunk on positivity.
Whew! In an age of toxic political rhetoric, never-ending cynical news cycles … how healing it feels to take a bath in sweet aromas of family, love, and delight of company.
Likewise, in Part II: The Fruits of our Labour, Neil Leadbeatter exhibits his craft-mastery in twenty-two poems. Word wizard that he is, Neil charmed me with farm-fresh word concoctions. These include (but are not limited to): “pamplemousse,” in the poem, “Pomelo,” “caterpillar codlin moths,” in “Grease-banding the Apple Trees,” and “biancolilla,” in the poem “Maltese Pearls”:
are the white olives of the Mediterranean
–bajda in the original–
blushed by brine to a pale ivory
(think of white cannellini beans
Or say bianca or biancolilla
and everyone will know what you mean).
Held in high esteem, they are
sacramental oil, gifts from God
shaped like crescent moons.
How readily you place them
pearlescent in your mouth.
Thriving on a diet of mouth-caressing words, Neil serves up “Pistachio”:
Say it loud
and it’s almost like sneezing–
that ‘semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion
of air from the lungs
through the nose and mouth’–
that makes you think of hay fever, salad,
dessert and pollen, of the terraced orchards
of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and northern Iran:
a Silk Road indulgence
in the dust bowl of summer.
Stylistically, Neil writes in crisp free verse forms making flawless endline decisions. Both poets nourished my spirit beyond the subject of food itself. Indeed, they paint pictures of their respective worlds. “Street Vendors,” caused salt-sea air and more to infiltrate my nostrils:
You find them in open-air markets, laying out their stalls
piling high their wheeled carts, circling
the perimeters of parking lots, staking out their patch
where the salt-sea air
carries their flavours across
east-end neighbourhoods, narrow-gauge side-walks,
promenade tracks
offering a medley of wide-eyed dishes:
sundried apricots stuffed with walnuts,
charcoal-roasted corn on the cob
cow’s milk yogurt in wild bee honey–
their street cries mingling with the passing traffic
heavy with commerce and trade.
Part III. Poet to Poet: The Dialogue Poems, features ten poems, five by each poet. Together, they playfully chide one another, while cooking up a smorgasbord of poetic confections. These exceed (if such be possible) even the prime rib delicacies of the Sinorak in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1965.
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