Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in Enola Gay, his second volume of poems, Mark Levine surveys the disaster. Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History as a stark meditation on Blanchot's sense of writing as the "desired, undesired torment which endures everything."
Levine engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. Enola Gay's "mission" can seem spiritual, imaginative, and militaristic as the speaker in these poems surveys marshes and fields and a land on the edge of disintegration. Levine sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak.
Levine's stunning second book, with its grave cultural implications and its surveillance of a distinctly postmodern malaise, offers multiple readings. Here are compact poems with uncanny power, rhythm, and a strange, formal beauty echoing and renewing the legacy of Wallace Stevens for a new era.
Mark Levine is author of Debt, Jorie Graham's selection for publication in the National Poetry Series in 1993. He has received a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 1994-1995 he was the Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton. He teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. As a contributor to The New Yorker and Outside, Levine has reported on cultural, environmental, and social issues on four continents.
"A man steps into an abandoned church, notes the debris at the altar, misses his mother, and starts to sing. Thus begins Mark Levine's astonishing second collection of poems which meld wit with the profoundest gravity, peculiar narratives with linguistic precision, and hubris with sorrow. Read them."—Susan Wheeler, author of Smokes and Bag O' Diamonds
"Mark Levine's new poems conjure a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world. Here things here tend to be rusty, wet, subject to dry rot, incomplete, or just plain out of kilter. People react to each other, but strangely or tentatively; they maybe ‘asleep in the reeds with the migrating sea birds.’ There are unlikely lists: ‘Accordion, bamboo, crinoline, drift. / Burial, crabgrass, demonstration, edge.’ It's a terrifying but hallucinatory interregnum, where ‘. . . the dead and the sick and the poor are singing too. / And the stars begin to fall, and though everybody is waiting / for a terrible surprise, it hasn't come, not just yet.’ The ghosts who are waiting are memorable, and reading Enola Gay is an unforgettable experience." —John Ashbery
79 pp.5.5 x 8.25
9780520222601$23.95|£20.00Paper
Apr 2000