Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on January 1, 2005. The length of the article is 325 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The old constellation.(Poetry)(Poem)
Author: David Lehman
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2005
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 63Issue: 1Page: 144(2)

Article Type: Poem

Distributed by Thompson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Literary magazine ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

It's not quite what it should be
I expected quite a bit from this book. Not only is it's title *Best* American Poetry, but the a quick glance at the contents shows these names: A.R. Ammons, Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, Creeley, Rita Dove, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Paul Hoover, Andrew Hudgins, Donald Justice, Koch, McDowell, Merrill, Pinsky, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Snodgrass, Gary Snyder and Richard Wilbur. It's an impressive line up of names. But this collection was a let down. Sure, there were some really good poems (such as the one by Elizabeth Bishop), and there were a lot of ok poems or other poems worth noting, but it isn't worthy of being called the best of any given year. ... Read more

Product Description
Reviewers responded enthusiastically to An Alternative to Speech, David Lehman's first collection of poems, three years ago. John Ash, writing in The New York Times Book Review, praised Lehman's poetry as "elegant, exuberant, witty, lyrical and technically sophisticated." Mark Ford in The Times Literary Supplement called the poet's effects "irresistible." Lehman's new book is of equal or even surpassing excellence--notable for its wide range of subjects, its variety of inventions, its combination of wit and poignancy.PerfidiaYou don't know who these people are, or what They'll do to you if you're caught, but you can't Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry A briefcase into Germany, and here you are, Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is, Of course, the agent you're supposed to seduce And betray within the hour. Who would have known You'd fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh, But on the screen where your real life is happening It is always 1938, you are always dancing With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes Who slips the forged passport into your pocket And says she knows you've been sent to betray her, Or else it is seventy degrees and holding In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed From the car crash that wiped out your memory, Your past, as you walk into a gambler's hangout On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large, And the piano player plays "Perfidia" in your honor And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A Mixed Bag
As I began to read Part One of this book my first reaction was slight disappointment. I'd enjoyed more recent Lehman poems and been recommended this as his best book; I liked it, but not as much as I'd expected to. It irritated me that he wrote poems in perfect syntax and yet I couldn't always connect the sentences. In poems like "The Square Root of Minus One", "Heaven" and "The Right Number" he isn't working the same surrealist landscape as Mark Strand, but making intuitive leaps between different landscapes that I can't always follow. Then I got into his thirty sonnet sequence "Mythologies" which comprises Part Two of the book, and things began to click: it's necessary to think yourself into Lehman's head, almost. I was particularly taken by sonnet XVIII, where the end words take the form of a word puzzle. My favorite poems were probably those in Part Three, which comprises his wittiest poems: games with cinematography like "Perfidia" and "Henry James: the Movie" and satires like "Rejection Slip", "With Tenure" and "One Size Fits All." I liked the first few poems in Part Four, but all these are first person memoir type poems with a profusion of self-conscious character names and after a while the appeal dissipated. I wonder if I might prefer his more recent books.

Cutting edge verse
This is a dynamite book of poems. My candidate for the most underratedvolume of its decade! Favorite poems: "Perfidia," the hilariousanti-tenure tirade "With Tenure," the equally hilarious parody ofacademic lit crit ("One Size Fits All"), the amazing sequence of"Mythologies," the narrative poems set in the 1970s, etc etc etc.This book rewards multiple readings.

A real toad!
This book can be the most commercially successful book of poetry to be ever published if it were used as a cure for insomniacs. Mr. Lehman writes interminably boring lines which ultimately put this reader (and many others) to sleep. -Lucy Greely ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on January 1, 2004. The length of the article is 412 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The James Brothers.(Poetry)(Poem)
Author: David Lehman
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2004
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 62Issue: 1Page: 94(3)

Article Type: Poem

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more