New and Selected Poems

by David Lehman

Overview

A major collection of poems from one of our most accomplished poets, the prominent man of letters behind The Best American Poetry series.

Drawing from a wealth of material produced over the course of more than forty years, David Lehman’s New and Selected Poems displays the remarkable range of his poetic genius. A gathering of stunning new poems, prose poems, and translations from modern French masters ushers in the book. Selections from each of Lehman’s seven full-length books of poetry follow and are capped off by a coda of important early and previously uncollected works. Lehman writes poems that captivate as they stimulate thought, poems that capture the romance, irony, and pathos of love, and poems that are lyrical and lovely in unexpected, sometimes even comic ways. This is David Lehman at his best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476731872
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	11/05/2013
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

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. The most recent of his many nonfiction books is The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/23/2013
Lehman (When a Woman Loves a Man) enjoys an unquestionable prominence in American poetry, as much for his energetic editorial and critical work (he edits the Best American Poetry series) as for his own much-praised verse. This seventh volume and first selected places the poems themselves at center stage: they steer an entertaining, zigzag path between nonchalant Jewish-American autobiography and whimsical experiment. Lehman shows a genius for comic one-liners, for the humor at the root of pathos and the pathos inside tragedy: “my favorite word is ‘you.’ I love ‘you’ ”; “You either live too long or die too young—/ Nothing else is real, not even your childhood.” Especially in 50 pages of brand-new poems, Lehman mixes personal reminiscences with literary history, with results that defy realism but capture a certain extroverted tone: “Rabbi Kafka escaped to Mexico. Details are sketchy.” Earlier books show his way with game-like forms: daily poems, sestinas, and villanelles. (A handful of “early and uncollected” poems conclude the volume.) Skeptics may complain that Lehman’s verse is often too conversational and too low-pressure; admirers will connect it instead to the comic side of the New York School, to Ashbery and Koch. Attuned to the life of his own generation, and to the mechanics of memory, Lehman remains a nonpareil creator of quotable remarks, often about how we write or about how we read: “The idea was to have a voice of your own… The result was that everybody sounded alike.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

David Lehman is a true literary man…Poems such as “Mother Died Today” mark the development of his style from a more accessible, straightforward poetry with narrative and storytelling, to a more experiment, mashy style of contemporary poetry, often engaging in dialogue with other works of art.

The Literary Man

Inventive and often winningly sincere…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.

Robert Pinsky Book World

Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.

Entertainment Weekly - Ken Tucker

The urbanity of David Lehman is a breath of fresh air. Lehman’s poems can be insouciant, discursive—I associate them with New York School figures like Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and early John Ashbery, but also with the lighter side of Auden. He’s not an earthy poet but a man about town who can see his life in the context of popular culture. . . . Lehman’s New and Selected Poems has the spark of life in it, a mind alive to all kinds of stimuli and a sense of pulse-quickening experience. This is a book I would pay money for.

Hudson Review - David Mason

There is a generousness of spirit that the poet and the anthologist have in common. As a poet, Mr. Lehman has always been conversational in style, given to seemingly casual aperçu that take on a larger resonance…His poems weave through history, philosophy, sports, love, jazz, New York life, family life, Judaism and poetry.

New York Observer - Sarah Douglas

[Lehman’s] lines echo others from Blake, Donne, Frost, Keats, Eliot, Dickinson, the Great American Songbook, and many others, usually not in poems that cite them by name and never to flout his knowledge…His matter is personal, his language common, and his manner surrealist.

Booklist - Ray Olson

Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer.

Robert Olen Butler

Lehman is a combination of Mark Twain, Charlie Rose and John Le Carre with a little John Donne thrown in.

Washington Independent Review of Books - Grace Gavalieri

Inventive and often winningly sincere…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.

Washington Post Book World - Robert Pinsky