Yeshiva
Boys David Lehman. Scribner, $30 (160p) ISBN 978-1-4391-3617-1
Disarmingly casual, unexpectedly serious, alert to his
predecessors and mentors in literature and in life, Best American Poetry series
editor Lehman (When a Woman Loves a Man) has produced a seventh book of
uncommon variety. Some poems consider writing itself, as inspiration, as
vocation, as business—“That's the thing about ambitious middle-aged
writers/ who used to be young: each has a secret problem,/ and if they confess
it, they think it will advance/ their careers.” Others seek the
informality that Lehman's readers have come to expect. The Jewish content
promised by the title arrives in force late in the volume, as the title poem
cuts between Lehman's remembered childhood and his adult meditations on
heritage and the Holocaust: “I feel as if my real life is somewhere else,
I left it/ back in 1938.” (Lehman's mother, who speaks the prose
epilogue, describes her life as a child in Vienna and as a refugee.) Lehman,
who lives in New York, remains alert to many styles and forms; as a poet he has
often followed in the tracks of Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara. The title poem,
leaving those influences behind, will seem to some readers flat and without
style, to others as personal and as profound as anything Lehman has written. (Nov.)
from Publishers Weekly, August 17, 2009