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New California Poetry #02: Enola Gayby Mark Levine
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in Enola Gay, his second volume of poems, Mark Levine surveys the disaster. Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History as a stark meditation on Blanchot's sense of writing as the "desired, undesired torment which endures everything." Levine engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. Enola Gay's "mission" can seem spiritual, imaginative, and militaristic as the speaker in these poems surveys marshes and fields and a land on the edge of disintegration. Levine sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak. Levine's stunning second book, with its grave cultural implications and its surveillance of a distinctly postmodern malaise, offers multiple readings. Here are compact poems with uncanny power, rhythm, and a strange, formal beauty echoing and renewing the legacy of Wallace Stevens for a new era. Synopsis:"A man steps into an abandoned church, notes the debris at the altar, misses his mother, and starts to sing. Thus begins Mark Levine's astonishing second collection of poems which meld wit with the profoundest gravity, peculiar narratives with linguistic precision, and hubris with sorrow. Read them."--Susan Wheeler, author of "Smokes and Bag O' Diamonds"
"Mark Levine's new poems conjure a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world. Here things here tend to be rusty, wet, subject to dry rot, incomplete, or just plain out of kilter. People react to each other, but strangely or tentatively; they maybe 'asleep in the reeds with the migrating sea birds.' There are unlikely lists: 'Accordion, bamboo, crinoline, drift. / Burial, crabgrass, demonstration, edge.' It's a terrifying but hallucinatory interregnum, where '. . . the dead and the sick and the poor are singing too. / And the stars begin to fall, and though everybody is waiting / for a terrible surprise, it hasn't come, not just yet.' The ghosts who are waiting are memorable, and reading "Enola Gay is an unforgettable experience." --John Ashbery Synopsis:"A man steps into an abandoned church, notes the debris at the altar, misses his mother, and starts to sing. Thus begins Mark Levine's astonishing second collection of poems which meld wit with the profoundest gravity, peculiar narratives with linguistic precision, and hubris with sorrow. Read them."--Susan Wheeler, author of Smokes and Bag O' Diamonds "Mark Levine's new poems conjure a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world. Here things here tend to be rusty, wet, subject to dry rot, incomplete, or just plain out of kilter. People react to each other, but strangely or tentatively; they maybe 'asleep in the reeds with the migrating sea birds.' There are unlikely lists: 'Accordion, bamboo, crinoline, drift. / Burial, crabgrass, demonstration, edge.' It's a terrifying but hallucinatory interregnum, where '. . . the dead and the sick and the poor are singing too. / And the stars begin to fall, and though everybody is waiting / for a terrible surprise, it hasn't come, not just yet.' The ghosts who are waiting are memorable, and reading Enola Gay is an unforgettable experience." --John Ashbery About the AuthorMark Levine is author of Debt, Jorie Graham's selection for publication in the National Poetry Series in 1993. He has received a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 1994-1995 he was the Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton. He teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. As a contributor to The New Yorker and Outside, Levine has reported on cultural, environmental, and social issues on four continents. Table of ContentsThen for the Seventh Night Eclipse, Eclipse Susan Fowler Horizon Combinations Jack and Jill Counting the Forests Lyric Hello Lyric The Response Place My Friend A Harvest Two Springs Ocean Lullaby Event Island Life Everybody Riddles of Flight Lyric Enola Gay The Holy Pail John Keats Lyric Unlike Graham Winter Occasional How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear By Edward Lear Forgetfulness A Focus on the Elemental Oven (Six Moments) New Song Jean Cocteau Moon Mistaken Chimney Song Light Years The Fixed Wing Elegy (Terence Freitas) Lyric Wedding Day What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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