The Morning Line

The Morning Line is David Lehman’s most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity of poems written with candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age. Lehman is a poetic ventriloquist, and he expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” and Hölderlin’s “Half-Life.” The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry. Excerpt from “Fats Waller Live in 1935” Think of that: in 1935 when everyone was supposed to be miserable, here was Fats Waller in his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grin playing and singing for the sheer joy of it.