Operation Memory (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) [Hardcover]

David Lehman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1990 | Series: Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

Reviewers responded enthusiastically to An Alternative to Speech, David Lehman's first collection of poems, three years ago. John Ash, writing in The New York Times Book Review, praised Lehman's poetry as "elegant, exuberant, witty, lyrical and technically sophisticated." Mark Ford in The Times Literary Supplement called the poet's effects "irresistible." Lehman's new book is of equal or even surpassing excellence--notable for its wide range of subjects, its variety of inventions, its combination of wit and poignancy. Perfidia You don't know who these people are, or what They'll do to you if you're caught, but you can't Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry A briefcase into Germany, and here you are, Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is, Of course, the agent you're supposed to seduce And betray within the hour. Who would have known You'd fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh, But on the screen where your real life is happening It is always 1938, you are always dancing With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes Who slips the forged passport into your pocket And says she knows you've been sent to betray her, Or else it is seventy degrees and holding In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed From the car crash that wiped out your memory, Your past, as you walk into a gambler's hangout On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large, And the piano player plays "Perfidia" in your honor And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The American Religion
The Answering Stranger
Arrival At Kennedy
Cambridge, 1972
Defective Story
The Delayed Reaction
The Desire For Strange Cities
Fear
For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly
Four Versions Of The End
Gallery Notes
Heaven
Henry James: The Movie
Museum, 1980
Mythologies
New York City, 1974
One Size Fits All: A Critical Essay
Operation Memory
Pascal's Wager
Perfidia
Plato's Retreat
Rejection Slip
The Right Number
Spontaneous Combustion
Spontaneous Generation
The Square Root Of Minus One
The Survivors
Vietnam Memorial
With Tenure
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 104 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr (April 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691068488
• ISBN-13: 978-0691068480
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cutting edge verse, September 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Operation Memory (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) (Paperback)

This is a dynamite book of poems. My candidate for the most underrated volume of its decade! Favorite poems: "Perfidia," the hilarious anti-tenure tirade "With Tenure," the equally hilarious parody of academic lit crit ("One Size Fits All"), the amazing sequence of "Mythologies," the narrative poems set in the 1970s, etc etc etc. This book rewards multiple readings.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Bag, September 7, 2006

By 

Anna Evans (Hainesport, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Operation Memory (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) (Paperback)

As I began to read Part One of this book my first reaction was slight disappointment. I'd enjoyed more recent Lehman poems and been recommended this as his best book; I liked it, but not as much as I'd expected to. It irritated me that he wrote poems in perfect syntax and yet I couldn't always connect the sentences. In poems like "The Square Root of Minus One", "Heaven" and "The Right Number" he isn't working the same surrealist landscape as Mark Strand, but making intuitive leaps between different landscapes that I can't always follow. Then I got into his thirty sonnet sequence "Mythologies" which comprises Part Two of the book, and things began to click: it's necessary to think yourself into Lehman's head, almost. I was particularly taken by sonnet XVIII, where the end words take the form of a word puzzle. My favorite poems were probably those in Part Three, which comprises his wittiest poems: games with cinematography like "Perfidia" and "Henry James: the Movie" and satires like "Rejection Slip", "With Tenure" and "One Size Fits All." I liked the first few poems in Part Four, but all these are first person memoir type poems with a profusion of self-conscious character names and after a while the appeal dissipated. I wonder if I might prefer his more recent books.

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A real toad!, February 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Operation Memory (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) (Paperback)

This book can be the most commercially successful book of poetry to be ever published if it were used as a cure for insomniacs. Mr. Lehman writes interminably boring lines which ultimately put this reader (and many others) to sleep.

-Lucy Greely