I’m pleased to share with you below a wonderfully perceptive review by Helane Levine-Keating of my latest book, In Praise of Manhattan, in the current issue of the American Book Review.

Helane Levine-Keating is a poet, fine art photographer, and professor of English, Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at Pace University NY. Her poetry collection Lunar Eclipse was published by Finishing Line Press in January 2018, and her poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She divides her time between Manhattan and New York’s Catskill Mountains.

Mannahatta

By Helane Levine-Keating

When his fourth book of poems, In Praise of Manhattan, appeared in early 2020, award-winning financial journalist and poet David M. Katz could hardly have imagined the radical transformation his beloved city would undergo a few weeks later due to a global pandemic. It is difficult to read this collection of thirty-four poems, all inflected with intimations of mortality, without remembering Manhattan’s mid-March transformation, its streets punctuated by screaming ambulance sirens. Yet these poems came before everything changed, and despite the thread of darkness woven throughout In Praise of Manhattan’s three sections, Katz’s poetry ultimately celebrates the beloved city he has walked his whole life and those who walked beside him.

Immediately thrusting readers into the noisiness and occasional silences of Manhattan streets, Katz’s opening poem “Meditation” contemplates the “bliss” of “striving put to bed: / Only here, and now, and only this, / This blessed quietness.” While lines about The Rockies, “a life of nature and wide-open spaces,” and joining a commune revisit the road he nearly took as a young man, Katz assures himself he has made the right choice as he depicts himself now as “a citizen / Of narrow eastern regions, noisy streets, / meditating on the passing silence.” On the other hand, the sonnet “Borders,” this section’s titular poem, depicts the masked kids who bravely come to the door on Halloween before it morphs into a vehicle for effectively and empathically revealing the speaker’s opposition to recent crackdowns on immigration:

For others, at the border, there are no
Such masks. For them, the shock comes suddenly
Out of the darkness, and the giants who
Lift them from their parents’ arms are too
Vast, too high, too formless to be seen.
This is a different kind of Halloween.

Shifting from the larger view to the more personal in “Poem Ending with Frost,” with its punning title and the poem itself blending cold weather and an allusion to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Katz conjures up his shadowy father as a car motor turning over reminds him of his “father breathing / Visibly in the parking lot in winter” and the elusive silence in between the breath and the motor starting “[t]hat has made all the difference.” In “The Poetics Lesson,” when his seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Lazarus chokes up while reading his class John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” Katz remembers seeing in his mind’s eye “the open graves / Of pain” that speak to the boyhood nightmare he’d had of a World War III the previous night, while the poem’s final lines illuminate the shocking moment that perhaps played a role in inspiring Katz to become a poet:

… It has been fifty years
Since then, and still that voice is in my head,
About to speak, while Mrs. Lazarus
Returns to earth to read those lines again,
The lines in which the living hear the dead.

Surely that her name is Mrs. Lazarus suits his memory of her as she rises up in his heart and head to “read those lines again.”

It is in the three concluding poems of this section,” “Ubi Sunt,” “On Retirement,” and “Those Last Few Days,” however, that we encounter Katz’s current concerns regarding aging, ephemerality, and the often baffling way forward in this new phase of senior citizenship. As the speaker of “Ubi Sunt”—the Latin rhetorical question “Where are those who went before us?”—considers former clerks, office managers, and executives with whom he once worked but who have faded now “from these aisles of glass dividers” almost as if they never were, his fear of becoming invisible when he departs from the working world surfaces in his final line, “They are all gone into a world of light.”

Mulling life after retiring in the ambitious and brooding “On Retirement,” Katz presents readers with a more formally structured poetic sequence of seven linked and numbered sonnets that mostly follow a Shakespearean rhyme scheme although the final rhyming couplet has been replaced by the repetition of each sonnet’s last line in the opening line of the following one. In the first sonnet, Katz satirizes what this unenticing future bodes: “To read the Times / Till noon, then take a walk around / The reservoir in Central Park. Oh God. / And then the naps and then the gins and limes.” In the second sonnet, he hopes like many other aging Boomers, that “retirement is more than wills / And an inability to pay our bills / Till 95, the outcome of my flawed / Philosophy of carpe diem,” while the third sonnet ends with his father’s “sudden stroke,” which hovers like an umbrella over the sequence’s entirety, as Katz speaks in “4” of his “disappearing dad, who always clouds / My mind when I consider my next steps. / His disappearance turns my mind to stone.” In “5,” Katz ironically quotes Yeats’s “Second Coming”—“Surely revelation is at hand”—and Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” — “The apparitions of these faces in / The crowd” — their lines conjuring up the faces of the poet’s dead mother and father as he tries to reign himself in, asking himself “Yet why persist in thinking of the dead?” Better, Katz states in “6,” to remember his life with “you / My best beloved, and remembering / Our life together, doing what we can / To stay in touch with what we know is true.” However, when the final poem of this sequence pivots back to images of friends and their conversations, all in “a similar bewilderment / And labyrinth” as they “trek on unknown ground” and the final line of “On Retirement” repeats its opening line,” “Oh let us finally get to our summations,” the shift from “my summations” to “our summations” honors old friends and mutuality rather than isolation: we are all in this together.

The second section, “Proof of Life,” continues to explore the themes of mortality and art, opening with “Elegy for A. G.,” a Zen-infused villanelle dedicated to poet Allen Ginsberg that repeats and alternates its upbeat opening line, “First thought best thought, the master said,” with its grim last line, “Where’s Allen now? Among the dead,” caustically underlining life’s absurdity. Even if we trust creative spontaneity, we’ll all eventually end up “among the dead,” Katz reminds his readers. Similarly, the powerful pantoum “Against Descartes,” interrogates Cartesian reasoning:

But what do you think when you have ceased to think?
You’ll know if you begin your dying now.
But no, you think. You are alive. You think,
Therefore you are. You are not dying now.

With his dark humor, Katz’s speaker ruminates on thinking, feeling, being, and dying, invoking the conundrum of whether thinking can ever “tell you what it’s like to die.”

Existential questions similarly inform many of the homages, memories, and ekphrastic poems in this section, as in “The Harvesters at 20,” where Pieter Breughel’s painting becomes a sensuous vehicle for remembering what it felt like to be twenty in London and “Lullaby” recalls the intimate bond forged as the poet sang “Moon River” to his infant child “from the muddy shore / Of [his] new fatherhood.” Yet it is the title poem of the section, “Proof of Life,” that best renders the poet’s preoccupation with time’s erasure of us all as it focuses on newly-discovered film footage of Marcel Proust: “So good to see Marcel alive again / In bowler and gray coat at thirty-three” before he will become the Proust we have come to know, “A man who captures time as it unfolds” in his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time:

… Suddenly he’s caught
On film, a proof of life for us beyond
The familiar boredom of the photographs,
The heavy eyes, the finger on the cheek,
Sickly….

Perhaps by seeing the long dead Proust at thirty-three “In our time, on the grand staircase, / A young man dart[ing] obliquely down the frame” there is, after all, in film and art, the answer to “Ubi Sunt” and the possibility of “Proof of Life” after death has effaced us.

In his final titular section of In Praise of Manhattan, David M. Katz returns his readers to the Manhattan city streets where the book began. In “Walking Up 34th Street,” the speaker’s self-mocking yet hopeful tone permeates lines describing himself as “68, a weird / New individual on this strange earth” who has been “walking here for many years” though still, for him, “The night is filled with possibilities.” On the other hand, the young poet who once saw himself as Walt Whitman in the penultimate poem “Mannahatta” now is “obliged / To wind my way through Mannahatta” where he will “meet the shadow of the man I was / Born to be, to be and die, but live past seventy.”

Fittingly, this fine and accomplished collection concludes with Katz’s eponymous poem “In Praise of Manhattan” with its epigraph “After Auden” that alludes to W. H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone.” Here Katz’s speaker moves from the personal to the plural, beginning with the perspective of “three-year-olds on their tricycles” to “two twelve-year-olds with a stick / and pink Spaldeen” to “noses / To be bloodied, school detentions to be served” then on to “a used Trojan absently / Discarded after two lovers disengage.” By the stanza’s end, though, Katz’s focus has begun to widen:

Manhattanites make the most of limited
Space, shifting themselves on crowded subway cars to fit,
And a single foot thrust through the closing doors
Can be accommodated, often uneasily,
Rarely with grace. Grace, in any case, is rare —
Although it can be found here and there, on our island.

In the second stanza, Manhattan’s “geologic components / Forged and forced, under heat and pressure,” its “limestone / Hardened into marble” are compared to “its packed citizens” who, he imagines, will “cram” on Manhattan’s “highest peak” when “the planet’s Ultimate Dissolution begins,” while the final stanza humorously conveys the traits Manhattanites share: “skeptical about paranoid conspiracies / Stiff-necked, argumentative” yet wanting to help when asked for directions:

… So it is that when you succeed
In stopping us on a subway platform, and we turn
To regard you with our characteristic
Impatience, and see that you are only asking how
To get to Euclid Avenue or Borough
Hall, we will give you much more than you have asked of us.

Infused with the mysteries of aging and time, In Praise of Manhattan too gives us much more than we have asked for: well-crafted, witty, mature paeans to the personal, political, and collective landscapes this poet has continued to inhabit over a lifetime. Speaking of a life well-spent rather than rued, of gratefulness, grace, and acceptance, David M. Katz offers his readers Manhattan streets very much worth walking.