Today (3/31/21), Caesura posted Inspector Watt's review of Poems in the Manner of, and in a curiously contrarian way I am pleased that in the poetry business, in which it sometimes seems that business is always personal (in defiance of the Corleone family's command not to mix the two), a review of a poetry book can appear four years after the book's pub date.
You ask who is Inspector Watt? I don't know, but the pseudonymous one also comments on Maureen McLane's 2014 volume This Blue and Chelsea Minnis's 2018 collection Baby, I Don't Care, with its wonderful title: Robert Mitchum's line in Out of the Past (which so well sums up Mitchum's attitude that it served as the title of Lee Server's biography of the actor). Inspector Watt's idiosyncratic style makes one wonder whether he praises with feigned damns. — DL
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Poems in the Manner of by David Lehman. Scribner Poetry, 2017 ($18.00)
There are two ways to look at this strange book of poetry, which “channels” poets from Catullus to Joe Brainard. If you’re not convinced that Lehman can imitate any poet you can name, at the end of the book, just for good measure, he includes his satirical lyrics for songs by Bob Dylan, Lorenz Hart and Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Lehman can parody anyone, with aplomb and humor. Here’s his tribute / goof on Bashō’s famous haiku: “Pond / Frog / Splash.” So, on the one hand, the book is a display of brilliance. But on the other hand, it wonderfully illustrates where contemporary American poetry is — driving forward by looking in the rear-view mirror. This book implies that the best poetry is behind us. The new and improved poets who have rose petals tossed at them by critics for their shockingly new and improved poetry pale in comparison to the poets listed on the front cover of Lehman’s book: Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda. OK, Ernest Hemingway not so much. Damn you, David Lehman. You’ve left me elated and depressed.