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I was about to be mugged by a man
with a chain so angry he growled
at the Lincoln Center subway station
when out of nowhere appeared a tall
chubby-faced Hasidic Jew with payess
and a black hat a black coat white shirt
with prayer-shawl fringes showing
we walked together out of the station
and when we got outside and shook hands
I noticed he was blind. Good-bye,
I said, as giddy as a man waking
from an anesthetic in the recovery room,
happy, with a hard-on. The cabs were
on strike on Broadway so beautiful
a necklace of yellow beads
I breathed in the fumes impossibly happy.

Reading along, we're whisked through the events at the same surreal speed Lehman was, skidding into home at the oddly biblical moment when he realizes the man is blind. As far as Lehman's concerned, by this time sucking in car exhaust is tantamount to drinking nectar, and the rush of intensity is palpable. The poem's real value, however, lies in its preservative quality. It reads like a story you'd tell friends, or your spouse or lover, when you got home from the fateful subway ride. After that, you might trot it out at a dinner party once in a while, but chances are it'd be lost in the shuffle of daily life.

Elsewhere there are sections where Lehman lays his feelings bare with good result. Like many of the poems in "The Daily Mirror," these personal missives lack punctuation, which compels us to swallow them whole. They jangle along in the same tone and rhythm as their more matter-of-fact counterparts, which makes their poignancy all the more effective; it doesn't hit until you've finished and had a moment to sit back and ponder the words. On April 10, in love, he writes:

there's the expression on your
face when I photographed you
in the bathtub there's spring
which came a month early
this year but is sticking around
for the celebration

On the topic of being a writer, not an easy subject to address without sounding pedantic, he offers this charmingly desperate picture, written on "April 27 or 28":

... you feel like
a writer facing a blank page,
and the trees may be full of rifles,
and the whole reason for crossing
the field escapes you now that
you have reached its edge,
and the rumor of a castle
on a high hill in the distance
is almost certain to turn out false.

The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry David Lehman Scribner, 158 pages Poetry Buy this book at B&N.com

Lehman is at his best when he's seemingly paying no attention to the project of putting together "The Daily Mirror." The most successful poems give the impression that he just wrote them and moved on. At several points, though, he bumbles around trying to figure out what to write about -- a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but he compromises our fun by putting these machinations into his poems in lines like "Immediately I knew I had to write a poem ending with that phrase" (Feb. 19) and "I think I will write a one-line/ 'Language' poem here it is" (June 9). It's somehow disappointing to be let in behind the curtain this way. This is a book that runs on pure verve, and such interjections gum up the works. Since Lehman discarded any number of poems in the selection process, thereby acknowledging that some were clunkier than others, it seems odd that he didn't remove all signs of winnowing. We know he's engaging in an exercise, but that doesn't mean we don't want the illusion that he isn't -- a little sleight of hand goes a long way.

But these moments ultimately don't damage the overall character of the book, which remains energetic even when it's discussing serious topics like death or social injustice, or even a petty book review. In this sense, Lehman has accomplished what he set out to do. He's created a kind of immediacy that's not easy to come by in poetry today, and he's injected it with a jazzy love of the everyday world that even O'Hara would have admired.
salon.com | Jan. 14, 2000

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