Enola Gay

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Poetry

by Mark Levine

University of California Press

Due/Published March 2000, 86 pages, paper

ISBN 0520222601

Levine's second volume of poems. Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in Enola Gay, Levine surveys the disaster. As California says: "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. 

"A man steps into an abandoned church, notes the debris at the altar, misses his mother, and starts to sing. Thus begins Mark Levine's second collection of poems which meld wit with the profoundest gravity, peculiar narratives with linguistic precision, and hubris with sorrow. Read them."ŃSusan Wheeler, author of Smokes and Bag O' Diamonds