Long Falling LightLong Falling Light

"Though he describes himself as an "amateur", Mark Louis Lehman has been writing poems, composing music, and telling stories for over a half-century. To this he adds: I'm a slow learner. Readers of this selection of his poems, however, will notice at once the surprising variety and pungent flavor of his many voices as they range from comedy and warmth to wit and irony, darker visions of existential dread and, at last, elegiac serenity. Consistently, Lehman delights in the music of spoken language; his poems are meant to be heard aloud, as he urges in this book: "Say the poem, and say it slow, before we sleep." Author's note: These poems, written from my teens into my old age, still give me pleasure though speak in many voices, and remain the occasional and stylistically varied experiments of an indolent if tenacious amateur. Many are playful or airily epigrammatic; others are little stories or musings, whether comic, meditative, visionary, or elegiac. If there's a consistent persona that shows through--besides an old-fashioned strain of music, fancy, and sentiment, and a retinue of persistent fixations--it doesn't seem much evident to me. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, a good poet is too many people to pin down. And who wants to be pinned down anyway? If I'm to languish on a shelf of dusty neglected volumes deep in some library's archives I want all my motley selves to be free to haunt the place"--Amazon.com.