Enola Gay (New California Poetry, 2) [Paperback]

Mark Levine (Author)

Book Description

Series: New California Poetry, 2 | Publication Date: April 11, 2000

Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in Enola Gay, his second volume of poems, Mark Levine surveys the disaster. Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History as a stark meditation on Blanchot's sense of writing as the "desired, undesired torment which endures everything."
Levine engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. Enola Gay's "mission" can seem spiritual, imaginative, and militaristic as the speaker in these poems surveys marshes and fields and a land on the edge of disintegration. Levine sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak.
Levine's stunning second book, with its grave cultural implications and its surveillance of a distinctly postmodern malaise, offers multiple readings. Here are compact poems with uncanny power, rhythm, and a strange, formal beauty echoing and renewing the legacy of Wallace Stevens for a new era.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The follow up to Levine's debut Debt (1993) finds the poet spinning confrontational riffs on the same big questions that vexed him before: how can art survive a great disaster (a world war, say)? How can it not make promises it can't keep? And how far can a poem's language crack before it breaks up like an ice floe, giving a lyric speaker no place or tradition on which to stand? Levine explores these questions in poems whose agitated "I" and "he" and "we" can represent ghosts, or dead poets (as in a poem called "John Keats"), or "Everybody," as in the poem of that name: "Everybody is visiting the gravesite of the President/ leaving plastic cups filled with wine and chocolate./ Everybody is holding their breath as the song approaches its end." Where Debt addressed the Middle East and the Holocaust, the new poems sometimes depict with a surer hand the gutted and bombed-out landscapes of postwar Japan and Europe. Levine wants, and gets, disturbing, paradoxical, tones--deadpan awe, sympathetic self-suspicion, outraged weariness: "the splash is coming, the reader is coming, the law/ is coming wearing Mother's private wig." In "Susan Fowler" Levine's "he" (perhaps a spy) encounters a violent, bearded man whose "shirt said 'Susan Fowler'": "He wanted to laugh but could not decide/ if laughter was an appropriate response." The book as a whole is a kind of triumph, one which perhaps does for poetry what David Foster Wallace has done for prose fiction. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Levine is the author of a previous collection of poetry, Debt. He received a fellowship from the NEA and teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. As a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and Outside, he has reported on environmental, social, and cultural concerns. Early on in this work, Levine presents several interesting excursions into the nebulous time of the ``Great War,'' when disease and disaster have ravaged the land and the gods were otherwise engaged ``pondering the sky from which they long ago fell.'' One is reminded of the dreamlike, post-apocalyptic world of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's short story ``The Portable Phonograph'': Levine certainly seems to shares Clark's conviction that mankind is fated to self-destruction and that, in a spiritual sense, it has already happened. Theirs is a gloomy doom of ashes and wastelands, damaged souls, and the broken contraptions of a civilization on whose grave they dance almost gleefully. Yet despite a promising start, Levine soon lapses into a private symbolism that becomes all too tedious to dissect. Picture, if you will, three Rod Serling Twilight Zone scripts about the end of the world, diced and blended and spliced, with every third word then expunged just in case any of it begins to make sense for longer than it takes to wind a melting watch. After a time, even Dali's landscapes appear habitable, if only because we have been there so many times before, haven't weor is this all just dark dj vu dreaming and shadowy foreboding? If you've been to one Armageddon, you've been to them all. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 79 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520222601
• ISBN-13: 978-0520222601
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,753,155 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Zzzz., July 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Enola Gay (New California Poetry, 2) (Paperback)

OH NO! -- "Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in Enola Gay, his second volume of poems, Mark Levine surveys the disaster." He's like the Angel of History or soemthing? Levine is a fine writer but there really aren't that many top-notch poems here; it's just the same tricks over and over, the same exhausted tone ad nauseum. Sure sure sure postmodern malaise. Please. We're bored. Do we have to be boring?

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars point for effort, August 2, 2000

By 

joshua levy (Columbia U, NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enola Gay (New California Poetry) (Hardcover)

Glancing over these other reviews I guess it's overkill to add yet another negative one, but I was interested--along with others--in seeing what this poet would next come up with after his first, very competent collection, Debt. I'm disappointed, and I suppose shocked as well. What's become of this writer we've had so much hope in? Not even the anxious, borderline-obnoxious page-long blurb from John Ashbery I fear can save this flop. Nor even justify it.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I don't know. . .disappointing to say the least. . ., July 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Enola Gay (New California Poetry, 2) (Paperback)

I LOVED Debt, Mark Levine's first book, so I was very disappointed to find this latest attempt so lacking--in feeling, in depth, in intelligence. The poems all seem to fall flat in a formal way, and the subject matters taken up only add to that lack of modulation throughout the book.

It's great to see that this young writer garnered so much attention with his first book that so many big names are willing to go to bat for him (there's an enormous blurb from John Ashbery on the back cover of the book)--I only wish the book itself deserved it.

It's a bad sign, too, [that] the only positive sentence out of an otherwise horrible New York Times review, [is] printed on this website as if to suggest the paper recommended the book...