Morning Line

<i>The Morning Line</i> is David Lehmans 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 Franois Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovskys Cloud in Trousers and Hlderlins Half-Life. The element of joie de vivre in Lehmans work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry. <b>Excerpt from Fats Waller Live in 1935 </b>Think of that: in 1935when everyone was supposedto be miserable, here was Fats Wallerin his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grinplaying and singing for the sheer joy of it.