Customer Reviews

Operation Memory (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

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

 

 

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.

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.

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