Valentine Place: Poems

by David Lehman

Book Overview

David Lehman's poetry has been praised in the New York Times Book Review as "elegant, exuberant, witty, lyrical, and technically sophisticated." With "Valentine Place", Lehman, the series editor of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684822792
• ISBN13: 9780684822792
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 94 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Lehmanism

David Lehman runs a reading series, writes criticism, and edits anthologies, but what he does best is write poems, and Valentine Place is a brilliant collection of some of his best work. Lehman's poems are funny, moving, and full of drama. He is a master of many forms, yet the work itself never seems formal or stilted. Read "Wedding Song," the villanelle that opens the book ("Poetry is a criticism of life/As a jailbreak is a criticism of prison"), to sample what the book has to offer. "A Little History," "Dark Passage," and the title sequence are among the book's highlights. Sex, love, death, politics, baseball---Valentine Place has it all. My only complaint is that there are none of Lehman's sestinas in this book---he's written some of the best.

valetine place

"Sometimes what you thought was an interruption/Turns out to be your life./And sometimes what you thought was your life/Turns out to have been an interruption./and yet you have to act/As if you were back in the fourth grade/And knew the right answer was Pittsburgh/But put down Bethlehem just to see what would happen-/How it would be feel to be wrong."One reviewer termed the lines facile. They saved my life.

The best collection of thoughts and feelings on love.

Without question, the depth of emotion revealed and examined by this poet is remarkable. I laughed and cried with recognition. The book drew the feelings out of me. I felt the poet's joy pain misery and glorious resolutions and made them my own. No better choice for the lovestruck or lovelorn in this reviewer's opinion. Get it today.