Customer Reviews

Enola Gay (New California Poetry, 2)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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?

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.

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...

Full of tired irony that quickly becomes tiring, self-consciously clever, Berryman meets Ashbery in Levine's 2nd book but leaves any sense of *craft* at the door. Levine is trying achingly hard to do what poets like Joshua Clover, Brenda Shaugnessy and Karen Volkman do with far greater grace and skill. Levine is a tired parody of himself here.

Mark Levine's first book, Debt, was extraordinary. Deeply felt, it carried the reader with its melancholy and passion if not with its rather tepic forms. But this new book, Enola Gay, seems, unfortunately, like a parody of his first. Still riding on the coattails of his debut, "selected"--he makes sure to note in the bio--"by Jorie Graham," Levine's bland uses of form are simply boring; the subject matter he takes up--again--not any more fascinating than the first time he tried it. I've noticed some prose pieces by Levine pop up in glossy magazines like Outside recently. Perhaps he should stick to that.

I've just finished Levine's "Enola Gay" having admired his debut collection. I've also just learned that this volume is the first in a new series from the University of California designed to promote "new" experimental work.

I am quite frankly horrified that this sophmore collection by Mark Levine would be considered "experimental" or "new" in any way seeing as that it virtually plagarizes Levine's first book, exhibiting so little stylistic or emotional growth from his last.

If a poet can't find new ways of exploring his or her own past, own life, own world and own aesthetic, how on earth can his or her poetry reasonably be considered a startling "new" achievement for the genre as a whole?

Let's celebrate! Mark Levine has written his first book, Debt, yet again!

At the risk of being commanded to mind my ameloriating elders, ('O youth, show some common sense (and on behalf of poetry, thanks!)!'), I have to disagree with the position of some reviewers. First, a simple matter: the lack of music here is evident from the very first poems. With few exceptions, the language is charmless. Second, there's just something a little spooky about the voice(s) Levine adopts here. I see something that aligns itself with a universal contempt. I don't need any more of that, though there's plenty of it in the world. Third, unless one wants to make some sort of blither-blathery canned university argument about hidden narratives or propulsion as a result of narrative's absence (O baillement!), not much is going on, at least not enough to make one move from one line to the next. In short, it's dull without a story. I know, some people are happy with this (arrested) no-story position, or variations upon it--"narrative is squaresville, man, so here's some blather, and if you don't like it, look to yourself." But for many readers and writers, that's just dropping a rule of the game (or shutting down critical faculties). And the more rules we drop (and we've already dropped so many), the harder it is to openly slam a patently dull book that was likely published for "extra-literary" reasons. Note what happens when one does. . . . In short, this is a bad book, even with alleged green-eyed monster slain.

Mark Levine's second book is an excellent thing. This young poet has, in the space of seven years, become a mature poet. His first book, Debt, was a tour-de-force, a debut collection full of swaggering bravura, breathtaking brilliance of mind, and freedom of form. In his second book, Levine has reigned in the restless energy of these early poems. The wild utterances of Debt have given way to the strange, close, meditative poems of Enola Gay. Three great lyricists, Keats, Stevens, and Ashbery come to mind. Readers of Debt with recognize Levine's paranoid, fallen world where phones ring, strangers appear and take control, and sacred objects are glimpsed in bombed-out junk heaps of plaster, canvas, and tin shavings. Like Wallace Stevens, Levine is able to create, stanza by balanced stanza, a world both real and ravished by the unreal. Take Levine's poem, "Then for the Seventh Night." Levine's speaker, like the lone sea-girl in "The Idea of Order at Key West," has no other song to sing but the song of his self. Levine writes: "But he had no gestures to give, only the song/ whose disjointed verses he repeated." Should Levine have written Debt again? The previous reviewers think he should have, but they clearly have set their sights on the flashiest aspect of his early work, and were no doubt disappointed to see that real work is required to write real poems. The emotional honesty bound up in this surrealistic world wounds, mystifies, and moves the reader. With Enola Gay, Levine proves he is master of a sustainable craft.

A reader from Manhattan, New York

Although his excellent first book, Debt (which should be reprinted), subverts narratives, tells us things that are not to be trusted in order, perhaps, to discover what might be worth our confidence, Enola Gay is a more refined and thoughtful exploration of these issues. An altogether subtle and beautiful collection of poems, Enola Gay shows us what a moral poet Levine is. While the poems in Debt set out to say (in part) everything they were not going to be, the poems in Enola Gay are less busy fending off other voices and, in the process, something brutal leaves the work. We don't find poems littered with dismembered bodies and other evidence of cruelty; instead, the losses split themselves up and run out into the world, like mercury from a broken thermometer onto the surface of the page. The poems occupy a space on the page and in the world in which everything has been lost and broken. They ask us who might be responsible; and the answer, of course, is that the poet is, that we are. The work remains ferocious, unflinching, and measures everything equally: the dead, systems of thought, the damaged world, poetry, the selves on the page. The self is made up of many selves, who communicate inadequately with each other and resent one another, but are tied together anyway, like a querulous married couple. However ironic the work can be, however skeptical of our ability to find any kind of meaning that is trustworthy, it nevertheless takes the search for meaning and our moral responsibilities to one another, to the natural world, very seriously.

Incidentally, the voices in Enola Gay split themselves up far more effectively than one reviewer on these pages, who was so disappointed in the refinement of Levine's voice that he or she felt compelled to send reviews from various "locations" throughout the country. It's amusing reading, but, really, your time is much better spent with Levine's brilliant Enola Gay.