Product Details
Scribner, November 2009
eBook, 112 pages
ISBN-10: 1439156263
ISBN-13: 9781439156261
Description
David Lehman, a poet of wit, ingenuity, and formidable skill, draws upon his heritage as a grandson of Holocaust victims and offers a stirring autobiographical collection of poems that is his most ambitious work to date. It covers an expansive range of subjects -- from love, sex, and romance to repentance, humility, the meaning of democracy, Existentialism, modern European history, military intelligence, and the rituals associated with faith and prayer. The title poem, "Yeshiva Boys," is a work in twelve parts that blends the elements of espionage fiction, memory, history, and moral philosophy. It reflects David's experience as a student in an orthodox Yeshiva, and it, along with many other poems in the book, explores what it means to be a Jew in America, what is gained and lost in assimilating to secular culture, how to understand the peculiar destiny of the Jewish people, and how to reconcile the existence of God with the knowledge of evil. Beautiful, provocative, and accessible, this is David Lehman's most inspired collection.
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"Disarmingly casual, unexpectedly serious, alert to his predecessors and mentors in literature and in life...Lehman has produced an eighth book of uncommon variety.... As personal and profound as anything Lehman has written."-Publishers Weekly
"These poems comprise offerings, elegantly undercut with wit, to the gods and goddesses of language and wordplay, poetic form and poetry's rich history. But more than that, they reflect an expansive mind's enormous complexity as it recounts a lived life. The whole of a world is here, and the remnants of an era -- from Dinah Shore to Bob Dylan, from Hitler to Nixon. Under the pretense of a 'new project to ward off ennui' Lehman has written a brilliant slant-told story of coming-of-age in America in the Cold War era, a story that captures that period's disquiet and confusions, as well as its remembered pleasures. Each poem is a set piece in the history of becoming. They are intelligent, wry, and sometimes lacerating in their moments of melancholic tenderness."
-- Mary Jo Bang, author of Elegy
Forward, September 16, 2009
...Listening to Classic American Popular Songs” (Yale University Press, 2001), itself something of a classic. Poet and editor David Lehman has just entered this crowded field with a highly personal new book, “A Fine Romance: Jewish ...
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