The Morning Line: Poems

by David Lehman

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. 

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2021

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]

This remarkable new book by David Lehman takes a tour of his many varied styles. There are some of energetic, free-flowing daily poems that I've always loved in books like The Evening Sun and Playlist, but also plenty of more carefully structured work like in his Valentine Place and When a Woman Loves a Man. There's even some of the playful parodying Lehman does from time to time, including having a bit of fun in "After Catullus," an excellent piece that, for reasons of Goodreads's language standards, I won't quote here. That said, Lehman sums up his own work perfectly in the opening stanza to "Panama Hat":

"What kind of poems do you write?"
the interviewer asked and I said occasional poems
each day is an occasion...

All in all, another excellent book. Read it. It's definitely worth your time.