The Morning Line is David Lehman’s most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity of poems written with candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age.
Lehman is a poetic ventriloquist, and he expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” and Hölderlin’s “Half-Life.” The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.
Excerpt from “Fats Waller Live in 1935”
Think of that: in 1935
when everyone was supposed
to be miserable, here was Fats Waller
in his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grin
playing and singing for the sheer joy of it.
Lehman is a poetic ventriloquist, and he expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” and Hölderlin’s “Half-Life.” The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.
Excerpt from “Fats Waller Live in 1935”
Think of that: in 1935
when everyone was supposed
to be miserable, here was Fats Waller
in his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grin
playing and singing for the sheer joy of it.
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