When A Woman Loves A Man

Poems

David Lehman (View Bio)
Trade Paperback: Scribner, 2005; Hardcover: Scribner, 2005.

"Reading David Lehman's new book is like listening in on a great conversation between smart, well-informed folk with wry wit and scathing spirits. It is also a submission to The Great Conversation ...Lehman is a poet's poet, and poetry is and it's machinations are at the heart of this collection. It could accurately have been titled When a Man Loves Poetry.... a masterful construction... tight, surly, teasing, and, too, laced with the pathos of the thinking man who knows knowing is never enough." — Laura McCullough, Spiral Notebook

"David Lehman's new book... demonstrates that 'literary' can be a term of praise, not, as it sometimes is, of blame... The book is also 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... Lehman's writing is 'literary' in a way that shows how literature, along with other arts, is not a meadow for ruminative academic grazing, but a field of energy." — Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World

"Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer. His poetry rides the currents of the zeitgeist in ways that are deeply influential. And if you let him alter you, he confers something like peace upon you, for in Lehman the darkest moments are always a beat away from laughter and the lightest things are always going dark around the edges. What strange and profound comfort that is. WHEN A WOMAN LOVES A MAN is a truly important collection." — Robert Olen Butler (author of A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN)

"Lehman's latest amply demonstrates his formal and prosodic range...foregrounding Lehman's strengths as a writerhis humor, compact and direct syntax and easy musicality." — Publishers Weekly

"In this wide-ranging, provocative, and ambitious collection, Lehman, editor of Scribner's BEST AMERICAN POETRY series and an established poet in his own right, offers a rare union of poetic form with the felt cadences of ordinary speech. Pantoums, sestinas, sonnets, and villanelles all serve as vessels of the urbane comment, the arch observation, conversant dialog, and language felt and seen on the page. Few poets of any age capture spoken language and poetic form in such a dance.... The educated reader of poetry will find much challenge and delight in this collection, and those new to poetry will encounter some of the heights of which modern poetry is capable. This contribution to form should be celebrated; highly recommended." — Library Journal

"In David Lehman's poem 'The History of Modern Poetry,' he writes 'the idea was to have a voice of your own,/ distinctive, sounding like nobody else's/ The result was that everybody sounded alike.' This may well be true, but Lehman's 'everybody' voice still sounds uniquely his: wisecracking but resonant with the pleasures of poetry." — John Ashbery

"WHEN A WOMAN LOVES A MAN, Lehman’s best book of the last ten years, showcases Lehman’s deft hand with a sestina and an abecedarian. We read David Lehman for a particular kind of poem: humorous, at once upbeat and wistful, with a certain in-the-know, New York School-reminiscent cheekiness. This book manages to say something meaningful about love, pain, and prejudice, all in Lehman’s inimitable, whispering-something-amusing-into-your-ear voice." — Jeanine Hall Gailey, Smartish Pace