When a Woman Loves a Man: Poems - Softcover

Lehman, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743255941 ISBN 13: 9780743255943

Publisher: Scribner, 2005

Synopsis

This collection of poems from the series editor of The Best American Poetry and the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry seamlessly captures the romance, irony, and pathos of love.

David Lehman movingly chronicles the days in post-9/11 New York and bring a fresh perspective to an array of subjects -- from the Brooklyn Bridge to Gertrude Stein to Buddhism.

The work of a poet at the height of his lyrical and reflective powers, When a Woman Loves a Man is playful, inventive, and as amusing as it is clever.

About this title

About the Author

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. He has written such nonfiction books as Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

David Lehman's new book, When a Woman Loves a Man, demonstrates that "literary" can be a term of praise, not, as it sometimes is, of blame. The book begins with an exuberant adaptation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem about the Brooklyn Bridge. It also contains a sestina that uses the names of poets at the ends of its lines and is full of allusions.

The book is also inventive and often winningly sincere. The antic but persuasive title poem is indeed a love poem: a New York literary man's description of behavior between a him and a her, as heartfelt in its own way as the great Percy Sledge tune alluded to and reversed by Lehman's title. Like the late Kenneth Koch, and like the other "New York School" poets about whom Lehman has written in his The Last Avant-Garde, Lehman is candid as well as ironic -- sometimes, both at once. He generates a maniacal, irreverent, fast-thinking range of references to movies, poems, history. His poems responding to the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, because of their improvisatory, alert feeling, are not out of place among the love poems, the meditations on movies or music, the formal japes and backflips. Lehman's writing is "literary" in a way that shows how literature, along with the other arts, is not a meadow for ruminative academic grazing, but a field of energy.

This kind of energy would become tedious or tricky if it were merely amusing. Frank O'Hara knew how to spin suddenly from making the reader giggle to breaking the reader's heart. On a lower frequency, in his own way, Lehman can turn from a deadpan, reasonable soul's misgivings about T.S. Eliot's pronouncements to a reflection on history that cuts deeper than mere mockery:

Dante Lucked Out

T. S. Eliot held that Dante was lucky
to live in the Middle Ages
because life then was more logically organized
and society more coherent. The rest of us however
can't be as sure that if we'd had the fortune
to walk along the Arno and look at the pretty girls
walking with their mothers in the fourteenth century,
then we, too, would have composed La Vita Nuova
and the Divine Comedy. It is on the contrary
far more likely that we, transported
to medieval Florence, would have died miserably
in a skirmish between the Guelphs and the Ghibelines
without the benefit of anesthesia
or would have been beaten, taunted,
cheated, and cursed as usurers
two centuries before the charging of interest
became an accepted part of Calvinist creed
and other reasons needed to be produced
to justify the persecution of the Jews.

This poem makes a significant transition from an unexamined, complacent and generalized use of the pronoun "we" ("if we'd had the fortune/ to walk along the Arno") to something more specific and real. The point is not merely to deride Eliot's comfortable upper-class viewpoint. The wiseguy quickness of "without benefit of anesthesia" taunts nostalgia for an idealized 14th century, then moves forward to a more-than-wiseguy perception. The word "anesthesia" serves as a hinge to the last six lines, which sweep ahead to consider a lack of moral feeling, or an imaginative numbness. Real nastiness and historical savageries bubble under the surface of the nostalgia.

If any reader objected that those last six lines, covering usury, Calvin and the whole history of European anti-Semitism, oversimplify with their summary, Lehman would have available to him a response in the informal American playground idiom represented by the "lucked out" in his poem's title. Making it too simple? . . . . Well, the poet could say, T. S. Eliot started it.

By Robert Pinsky
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Lehman's latest amply demonstrates his formal and prosodic range as well as his unstinting loyalty to the tones, predispositions, prejudices and forms of the New York School of poets, particularly Ashbery, O'Hara and Koch. The autobiographical "Wittgenstein's Ladder," "In Freud's House" and "The Code of Napoleon" are distinctive, Mel Brooks–like summations of their subjects, foregrounding Lehman's strengths as a writer—his humor, compact and direct syntax and easy musicality—simply by presenting them through the prism of historical subject matter: "He's the shortest man in the room, the only one who thinks / He is Adolf Hitler. Everyone else is Napoleon." "Jew You" features a litany of slanders gut-wrenching in their pain and humor, and it ends on a nice twist: "...and when Lionel Trilling asked Allen Ginsberg why he, a fellow Jew, / had written 'fuck the Jews' in his dorm room window, / Ginsberg sighed: 'It's very complicated.' Now there was a Jew." Lehman cannot "take wing" the way his hero-poets did in the '50s not only because he lacks the spirit of the enigma – the Surrealist aspect of New York School hijinks eludes him – but simply because he doesn't seem to like his time very much. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743255941
• ISBN 13: 9780743255943
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144