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"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
List of contents
Then 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
About the author
Mark 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.
Summary
Engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. This book 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.
Additional text
“Reading Mark Levine's Enola Gay is a near-religious experience. . . . . You could read contemporary American poetry for many years and not come across a work as distinctive as this.”
