Malca Litovitz
stays in her poems with the arduous emotional path of her many attachments.
She writes in a singular poetic voice of the groundlessness, the transitory
nature of any relationship, and her wonder at the timeless quality of
the traces love leaves in the mind and heart. At the Moonbean Café
often deals with loss, ever present even in the happiest and most fulfilled
instances the poems enact, but her joyousness, gentleness and wisdom,
her caressing poetic voice and intimate address to the reader are authentic
feelings beautifully and naturally projected. It is as if a friend should
have strayed from a conversation over coffee about a love relationship
into Provencal song without our becoming aware of the transformation of
a banal conversation into high art. To use Malca Litovitz' favourite image
of the poet's work, it is like a bird opening its beak to feed or sing,
easy and somehow right even in the bleakest moments in human relationships.
In Malca Litovitz's
work one finds a comfort with the body, with sexuality, and a genuine
regard for the viewpoints of both sexes rarely encountered in contemporary
poetry.
-Ron Charach
Malca writes with
charm and heart. Her poems of family life, her loves, her friends and
keen observations should be savoured over a full-bodied cup of coffee.
-Terry Watada
From the smallest
details of everyday life to the expanses of the human heart, Malca Litovitz
uses all her senses to fullest advantage in writing about the pains and
pleasures of living. She is a keen observer, an alert listener, with a
warm, courageous humanity. In At the Moonbean Café, memory,
family, love (both spiritual and physical), Nature, the sadness and joyousness
of life, creativity are all explored with a rich imagination and generous
spirit. "Sunday morning, pale sky. / I can no more ask you to be
there / than call a dream to life" Litovitz writes in "Seed
Pearls." But her opulent, evocative poetry does bring dreams to life
for the reader.
-J. J. Steinfeld
Malca Litovitz's
chiaroscuro sparkles with moonbeans and the bright lights of new beginnings,
but may also cast sombre shadows. She enthusiastically embraces the stellar
company of Carole Leckner, Mick Burrs, and Anne Szumigalski. Her multi-coloured
lenses choreograph the rays of a Chagallian shimmer, meaningful prayer,
and erotic longing. Birds take wing to the music of her spheres, while
her still-life portraits are framed beside the French Impressionists.
Drink in these poems.
-Michael Greenstein
From Grandmother's
Limoges to the Moonbean Café itself, Litovitz sets a rich and vibrant
table.
-Susan L. Helwig
Malca Litovitz
Malca
Litovitz teaches Creative Writing at Seneca College in Toronto. She wrote
People Like Us, a poetic ballet text performed in 1994 at Studio
Theatre, Ford Centre for the Performing Arts and in the Festival of Original
Theatre, Robert Gill Theatre, University of Toronto. Her first book of
poetry was To Light, To Water (Lugus, 1998; Spanish translation
by Alexis Cabrera, 1999). She won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry
in 2000 for this collection. Her work has appeared in numerous literary
journals and in several anthologies such as great lakes logia,
Writers Undercover, and On the Threshold: Writing Towards the
Year 2000. She was short-listed for the CBC/Saturday Night Literary
Competition and the Milton Acorn Prize for Poetry. At the Moonbean
Café is her second full-length poetry collection.
Sample
Poems from Malca Litovitz's
At the Moonbean Café
Prayer
"We are only
mouth. Who sings the distant heart that dwells entire in all things."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
May confidence
come from my faith
integrity
from my capacity to love-
opening my heart
like the pages of this notebook,
knowing that the Word lies within me
is within all things
an open mouth
embracing my lover
as hungrily as the small birds
of morning
open their hearts
to sing in their brown nests
waiting for Mother to feed them
to nourish them in the spring air
and the sunlight falling on the garden -
the black shadow on the large, old tree.
Venetian Yellow
sun-dipped oars
on a funeral barge
ballet on water
pull the blind down
on the lovers
and leave them reflecting
leave them curving
her body
into a guitar
he can play to Latin music
Cuban sunshine
leave her realizing
a poem she wrote years ago
comes to life as she kisses his chin
as she cries into the round O of his mouth
airy and light
she hears his cry
in her mouth,
dark and deep,
tongue thick from kissing
Darkness of Fall
I remember Saturday afternoon walks with my father on the Bruce Trails where red bushy plants like bulrushes grew at the side of the path, and yellow buttercups the colours of chins un-knowing, "Margaret, are you grieving", and standing at the top of the mountain with Drew and looking out over the city and standing in Jerusalem at the Lion's Gate and sitting at an aqueduct near Ein Gedde and your description of the waterfall there and how we would swim nude at the top and how my husband and I took an air bath on Mt. Pilatus and almost made love until I feared goatherds would arrive or Belgian tourists, and I remember how Drew and I made love like dogs in Sherwood Forest, and now this sweetness, you and I standing like trees in the black night, the sky still luminous, the grass and leaves wet beneath my body, and how I kneeled to love you. You said our short span on earth was made worthwhile by the air beautiful and strange, by this Wildness, where poems write themselves and flesh unites around spirit in the darkness of fall.
In 1970, when I was in first year at the University of Toronto, Descant published a poem of mine in their first issue. The poem begins:
"To dare to
place my secrets before you
as gifts neither good nor bad but simply there"
It is in much this
same spirit that I still produce my work: for a particular beloved, for
a universal, omnipresent Creator, and for you, the reader - a person who
stands with a book in your hands opening the pages to receive gifts, healing
sustenance, dreams you can live. To stand with me in the places I stood.
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