The Evening Sun: A Journal in Poetry

by David Lehman

The eagerly awaited follow-up to his critically acclaimed collection The Daily Mirror, The Evening Sun gathers together 150 of David Lehman's favorite "daily poems" from 1999 and 2000 into a brilliant chronicle of a poet's heart and mind as the last century ends and a new one begins.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

David Lehman is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry series. He teaches at The New School in New York City.

Reviews

[Ace Boggess · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review of The Evening Sun was originally published in The Adirondack Review in 2002. I thought it should be here as well.
-------------------------------------

What can I say about David Lehman's The Evening Sun not made redundant simply by reading the book? Like its predecessor, The Daily Mirror, The Evening Sun is nearly perfect, a remarkable poetic vision of the daily life of the mind. For anyone not familiar with Lehman's poem-a-day project, anyone who has somehow avoided the date-titled poems in all the prestigious literary journals (not to mention online journals like Poetry Daily) where they have appeared, this collection will come as somewhat of a surprise. Dressed up as single-stanza journal entries that read like a foursome of Freud, Jung, Kafka, and Burroughs having a one-up contest by comparing dreams, Lehman's work is everything contemporary poetry is not, but should be (or at least, thanks to his ongoing proof with every poem he writes, everything it could be).
The Evening Sun runs 159 pages and covers, according to the author's preface, the years 1999 and 2000, with the dates jumbled up and no year attached, making the poems somewhat more universal. Lehman explained in the earlier collection how he often changes dates if two good poems coincide with the same date/title, making another interesting diversion to consider as one reads the poems: were these from '99, '00, or maybe another year altogether? It adds a hint of mystery to a book that already brings its own twists, turns, and red herrings.
Trying to break down these poems into patterns would be a difficult proposition. My first impulse is to say they begin with a clever opening as with these lines from "July 7":

The greatest genius in the history
of American marketing is the guy
who added the word "repeat"
to the directions on the back
of the shampoo bottle

Then they go off on a tangent, as in "November 15," which begins by talking about the day Sinatra's voice cracked on stage, but then dances stage-right or else through a trapdoor into:

. . .there's a new magazine on the net
called "Failure" I tried to access it today but could not
aha I got the Zen of the experience you say a hail Mary

Finally, the poems dovetail back into their tonic note, their primary theme. Or at least that is how I imagine these poems work. The truth, however, is that they often spiral around, leap from tangent to tangent like a squirrel among branches, they lose themselves, find themselves, lose themselves again, and ultimately come to rest in some momentary place of nirvana that may or may not have a connection to the opening line. In other words, sometimes these poems are the Kiddie Coaster, sometimes the Mountain of Deadly Thrills: fun at their simplest, at their best and most complex they leave you stunned, staggering away.
Recommendation: Buy two copies of this book, one to read a hundred times, the other for when the first one falls apart. Then, if you lack The Daily Mirror in your collection, buy that too. If Lehman sells enough of the first two books, maybe he will give us a third.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ambitious project that I admire despite containing a fair number of subpar poems. In 1999, David Lehman wrote a poem a day and selected the best ones to make The Evening Sun. I know David Lehman as the creator and editor of The Best American Poetry series; having never read his poetry, I expected it to be at the same caliber of BAP, but it's not. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt (for now), because creating and polishing a poem every day is a damn-near impossible undertaking.

There are a few things that bother me about Lehman's style. The majority of his poems don't have any fullstops, which make them seem jumbled and amateurish. The topics are repetitive and mundane: sex, the stock market, socializing with other poets, and baseball (I disliked his October poems the most—I can't give a single fuck about the New York Mets, the World Series playoffs, or baseball in general). Once I got used to his style and his ironic sense of humour I started to appreciate his poems more, even if they aren't exactly "high art." I also appreciate how he obviously put in an effort to seem more poetic, like ending several poems with rhyming couplets, and experimenting with form (a villanelle, a lipogram, and a poem with an AAAAAAAAAA rhyme scheme).

At his best, he writes lines like "a good old-fashioned New York feeling/hits me from head to toe a misanthropic snarl/the urge to kick a stranger in the pants/and if you don't smoke you feel as if you do" ("August 27," p. 96). At his worst, he writes "but she wants to tell you/the five things she requires/in a man one is intelligence/he must have a brain/also he must be good a term/she likes because it embraces both/the opposite of evil and "good in/bed" ("January 31," p.20) or a poem about the 69 sex act (p. 35 "The Lift") or a poem that ends "Well, fuck you/No, fuck you" ("Same Difference," p. 58)


Poems that I liked:
**Note: Most of his poems are untitled. I am using the dates of the poems for the sake of convenience.
"March 8," "March 19," "April 10," "The Lonely Crowd" (June 17), "July 23," "August 10," "Rap" (August 16), "August 27," "Happy Anniversary" (August 31), "October 18," "November 21," "November 22," "December 31."

=13/150 (8.7%) poems that I liked.

[Kayli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another chronological collection of poems that follows David Lehman's musings each day for a year. I read this some time ago but it was the sequel to The Daily Mirror. In many ways, the two are similar as Lehman covers a range of topics including travel, love, loss, and family but somehow this collection is different. It's a little more raw, a little more crass, and, perhaps, sassier than his first collection. As always, poetry is in the eye of the beholder and I definitely think Lehman's style is for some but not others. That being said, I did enjoy the collection overall and gave it four out of five stars. I would recommend it to anyone dabbling in modern poetry but if you didn't appreciate his style in The Daily Mirror then I'd say skip it.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i like the poetry journal conceit simply as an idea and also because i think it contributed to the generally casual feeling of this book. not directly or entirely about ny, but it runs through it. about half way through it occurred to me that it was written pre 9/11 and i think that's subtly apparant. anyway, i found myself smiling alot. "a good old-fashioned New York feeling/hits me from head to toe a misanthropic snarl/the urge to kick a stranger in the pants,/ and if you don't smoke you feel as if you do." totes.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

It may be that the "sequel" to any book of poems is going to lose some of its sense of urgency. But these poems, while stylistically astute and innovative (I like the talky poetry mixed with conflated sentences), there's not the real need for them. I understand the daily "occasion" for a poem has its own tradition, in some sense, but I'm not all that convinced about very many of the poems here. I understand that there can be poetry about the trivial, but it feels like these are more formulas that allow the poet to illustrate some specific moment.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wouldn't knock your socks off or anything but it was interesting how he made these poems work.

[françois]

Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, redux, but feels reheated.