New and Selected Poems
The presiding editor of The Best American Poetry heavily seasons his own work with . . . poetry. His 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. He’s formally various, essaying the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, and many less demanding forms, though he tweaks each a bit. Perhaps his happiest bouts of allusiveness are in his journals in poetry, The Daily Mirror (2000) and The Evening Sun (2002), which in their scantily punctuated (quotation marks only), often short-lined entries as well as quotidian content and anarchic enjambment suggest that Lehman, like Don Marquis, has a cockroach collaborator. The couplets of “Mythologies,” from Operation Memory (1990), which rhyme when diction allows rather than regularly, are pretty delightful, too. Lehman’s no reactionary, though, but thoroughly modernist. His matter is personal, his language common, and his manner surrealist. But the fact that he’s so heavily steeped in poetry makes him a poetry-lover’s poet supreme. --Ray Olson