“Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer.” —Robert Olen Butler
“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.” —Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World
“Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.” —Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly
Scribner is pleased to release a new collection from David Lehman, the editor of The Best American Poetry. Lehman’s extraordinary generosity and love for the genre, and his stature among writers, are well-known: the Poetry Foundation describes Lehman as “one of the foremost editors, literary critics, and anthologists of contemporary American literature,” as well as “one of its most accomplished poets.” Crowning these accomplishments is Lehman’s latest collection of poetry, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Scribner; November 5; 978-1-4767-3187-2).
Drawing from a wealth of material produced over the course of more than forty years, this collection opens with a gathering of stunning new poems, prose poems, and translations of Goethe and Apollinaire. Selections from Lehman’s seven published collections—including Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror—follow and are capped off by a coda of important early and previously uncollected works.
"Lehman’s poems are often described as at once witty, inventive, romantic, ironic, and brainy," writes Gwyneth Stansfield. "This collection is certainly all of those things and more. My own favorite poem,"Yours the Moon," displays a tough sincerity I find especially evocative and lovely":
the sky, distant,
endless, wears her
necklace of stars
over her dress
under my scarf
that she wears
against the cold
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS is David Lehman at his best―a collection that displays the full range of his poetic genius.
EVENTS:
New York, NY November 6 / 6pm
New York University Bookstore (Broadway and Waverly Place, NYC)
Reading followed by conversation w/ Ken Tucker
Long Island, NY November 8-9
Best of the Best American Poetry Festival
In collaboration with the Walt Whitman Birthplace and the Book Revue