Enola Gay

By Mark LeVine

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520924598

Mark LeVine

Mark Levine has been Stephen Pollan's collaborator for more than eighteen years. Together they have authored numerous books, including the national bestsellers Lifescripts, Live Rich, and Die Broke, and most recently, Second Acts. They have been nominated for three National Magazine Awards.

Book preview

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by Charlotte Hyde and Jean Sherman and by the General Endowment Fund of the Associates of the University of California Press.

ENOLA GAY

This work was generously supported by:

The Whiting Foundation;

the Council on the Humanities, Princeton University;

and the National Endowment for the Arts.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2000 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levine, Mark, 1965-

Enola Gay / Mark Levine.

p. cm. —(New California poetry; 2)

ISBN 0-520-22259-8 (alk. paper).

ISBN 0-520-22260-1 (pbk: alk. paper)

I. Title. II. Series.

PS3562.E8978E56 2000

811’.54—dc21 99-16316

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

08 07 06 05

10 98765432

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

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

Then for the Seventh Night

Then for the seventh night in as many nights he strayed into the vacant church and he kneeled in the aisle with his hands in his shirt and he remembered the song he wished not to remember; he remembered.

And he sang. And though the words were not familiar,

he kept singing, and he faced the dark altar where among paint cans and tar paper and a microphone with its wires torn out, he would have lit a candle had one been provided.

But he had no gestures to give, only the song

whose disjointed verse he repeated. And he wondered how many more nights his mission would last.

There was a magnet in his pocket and a hammer in his pocket and he could hear bats or mice or pigeons or maybe all three in the decayed choir loft.

He could hear the sound of the one train that came through each night with its cargo rattling on rattling flatbeds.

He missed his mother. He would look for her still in the green oblivious woods. And he would sing the song that her long absence implied, though his voice was not good and even he distrusted his voice.

From a nail hung a mural that he guessed was left behind by migrant workers

Reviews for Enola Gay

[realbigcat · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It may be my igorance but I just don't get this book. I've read a lot of poetry and if I decided to just write down anything that popped in my head and just piece it together then you would have this book. Some people may like this but I couldn't get thru the book. I would rather spend my time on a good book.