Mark Levine 
Enola Gay 

Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in
Enola Gay, his second volume of poems, Mark Levine surveys the disaster. Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche’s
The Angel of
History as a stark meditation on Blanchot’s sense of writing as the ‚desired, undesired torment which endures everything.‘


Levine engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events.
Enola Gay’s ‚mission‘ can seem spiritual, imaginative, and militaristic as the speaker in these poems surveys marshes and fields and a land on the edge of disintegration. Levine sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak.


Levine’s stunning second book, with its grave cultural implications and its surveillance of a distinctly postmodern malaise, offers multiple readings. Here are compact poems with uncanny power, rhythm, and a strange, formal beauty echoing and renewing the legacy of Wallace Stevens for a new era.


This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2000.

Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in
Enola Gay, his second volume of poems, Mark Levine surveys the disaster. Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche’s
The Angel of
History as a stark meditati

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Then for the Seventh Night

Eclipse, Eclipse

Susan Fowler

Horizon

Combinations

Jack and Jill

Counting the Forests

Lyric

Hello

Lyric

The Response

Place

My Friend

A Harvest

Two Springs

Ocean

Lullaby

Event

Island Life

Everybody

Riddles of Flight

Lyric

Enola Gay

The Holy Pail

John Keats

Lyric

Unlike Graham

Winter Occasional

How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear

By Edward Lear

Forgetfulness

A Focus on the Elemental Oven (Six Moments)

New Song

Jean Cocteau

Moon Mistaken

Chimney Song

Light Years

The Fixed Wing

Elegy (Terence Freitas)

Lyric

Wedding Day

Über den Autor

Mark Levine is author of Debt, Jorie Graham’s selection for publication in the National Poetry Series in 1993. He has received a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 1994-1995 he was the Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton. He teaches at the University of Iowa Writers‘ Workshop. As a contributor to The New Yorker and Outside, Levine has reported on cultural, environmental, and social issues on four continents.