Enola Gay

Every time I read a Mark Levine poem, I want to put the book right down and go and write some poems.

Levine's new book is one of the better books I've read in years. The poems are lyrical and unpretentious, and, thankfully, don't fall into any camp; instead, the poems are rhythmically intense and thoughtful, and clearly reveal a good ear and complicated outlook toward the world. He doesn't seem to be trying to answer this or that question, but rather address the process of thinking hard and deeply about things, and asking questions of himself. That kind of drama, in poetry, is rare today. The silly remarks by some of the other reviewers reek, frankly, of youth (envy comes to mind, especially given the childish shoot-em-up tone one reviewer in particular has adopted). I'd be hard-pressed to find another recent book that is as emotionally courageous and complicated as this one, and I follow new books pretty carefully. To me, these are the kind of poems you can keep coming back to (I way I do with Elizabeth Bishop, for example). The more closely you read the book, the deeper and more expansive it seems. I think it's a really terrific book, as do many of my friends and colleagues, and happily recommend it to others.

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.

Mark Levine continues his work on the outer edge of lyric poetry. This is brave writing that is smart, beautiful, and very much of the moment.

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