When a Woman Loves a Man is a book designed for readers with a certain curiosity for the more often than not indecipherable complexities of human relations, complexities that poet David Lehman examines with a certain and uncommon candor. Lehman moves through his book with an understated and intelligent gait, bringing a voice that is distinctively his from one form to another. But perhaps what is most appealing in his most recent offering is that not only is it wide-ranging in its subjects and structures, but it is written with a rare authority. He is at once a narrator and lyricist. Forms like the pantoum are well suited to Lehman's diction and through its pattern of repeating lines the reader is engaged in a manner much less likely to occur in free verse. He chooses a given form, not merely as an exercise, and not in order to demonstrate a certain proficiency, but instead as an especially appropriate and profitable forum; a forum wherein his versatility as a writer becomes evident. And in those lines and stanzas of his that are particularly well-wrought, the required repetition is nothing but a legitimate and wonderful excuse to say it again. Such is the case for Lehman's pantoum, "Space is Limited".

You're both going to die.
Have you remembered to adjust your asset allocation strategy?
You haven't got any, as Marlene Dietrich told Orson Welles
When she took his palm in her hand and examined it.

Have you remembered to adjust your asset allocation strategy?
You're supposed to do it once a year, like having a physical.
She took his palm in her hands and examined it, saying,
Are you on track for retirement? Is the window open?

And, of course, to the reader's delight, the first line, "You're both going to die" reappears as the last line of the poem as is the rule in the pantoum. Also of interest in this piece is the presence of a certain point and counterpoint with lines that differ significantly in both their sound and subject. He pairs a statement of death's certainty with a casual inquiry about asset allocation strategies. One can see this contrapuntal strategy at work in a number of his other pieces as well, a strategy that rarely, if ever, fails the author, and instead serves to continuously augment the depth, the humor and the intrigue found within his lines. There is scarcely anything predictable in coupling the certainty of death with investment strategies, nor is there in the first stanza of "The Double Agent".

It was going to snow and then it didn't snow.
He loved her like a dying man's last cigarette.

His lines at times seem to be excerpts from conversations, at once informal and intimate. Finding it unnecessary to complicate his diction with layers of inaccessible language, he instead drives each line, each stanza, and each poem to a precise point. Often there is more depth in what is forthcoming than what feigns to be so. In fact, one begins thinking that perhaps there is a reason why there is a certain reverence for and longevity to literary works that have comic underpinnings; for humor, or at least good humor in its various shapes and sizes, requires the writer's decision to bring truth to the page. Nietzsche writes, "And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh." And so it seems this notion would bode well for poet David Lehman. He writes in the first poem of the book, "When a Woman Loves a Man":

When she says Margarita she means Daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial .
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window."

He's supposed to know that.

Humor cannot be born out of that which is artificial, and perhaps in knowing this, Lehman confronts some rather weighty issues, and in an unapologetic, forthcoming manner. If there were little notes on the margins, the kind with which composers have been known to adorn their compositions, one might imagine his to be something on the line of, this is the way things are, play with conviction.

Clearly, Lehman has a list of publications in a number of genres that precede him in the arrival of this new work, and although subtle, there seems to be a qualitative shift that has taken place in his poetry. A careful reader may be afforded the privilege to catch glimpses of the poet's internal world, contemplative moments that are interpolated into verse otherwise appearing to follow in the tradition of his previous works. The poems that comprise this book may at first glance appear as a continuation of the work seen in The Evening Sun and The Daily Mirror, but upon closer examination one can speculate that their source is of a slightly different variety. In this one text, the poet is somehow able to offer the reader an emotionally varied experience; one can find humor but also moments of sorrow, of sarcasm, of solemnity, of irony, and finally, of meditation. In " Venice is Sinking", he inquires:

think of it-
what are the odds
that we'd still be here
as we are

And to call upon references to things external to the realm of poetry, something Lehman himself does thoughout his text, what is witnessed in When a Woman Loves a Man is not at all unlike the work of many writers, composers, and artists that have come before him; work that is the product of a time in their careers when they make a conscious choice, or perhaps a less conscious one, to begin playing with styles, with rhythms, with colors, with subjects, that they had never before investigated. Beethoven's Late Quartets, a series of string quartets, that have been considered some of his best, as well as some of music's best, were written later in his life and are distinctly different in both their sound and their structure. There is an uncommon simplicity to be found in the quartets and a certain playfulness as well. And for Lehman, there too is a change, which can be experienced in poems such as, "Wittgenstein's Ladder", "End Note", "The Knight of Faith", "My Life in Music", "Triplets", "The Radio", and "To the Moon".

The book begins with a prologue written after Mayakovsky, a man whose life certainly was not lacking in either complexity or tragedy. He is often first identified as one of the Russian Futurists, but he was also an extraordinary lyricist. This choice on the part of Lehman sets the tone for the remainder of his text, a text that sets about to tell a certain truth relying on a certain simplicity of tone and timing, regardless of the form, be it a pantoum, a sestina, or a one stanza free verse poem. And quite frankly seeing a book comprised of various forms is a welcome sight in a landscape of formless and subsequently often lifeless verse. The book is, at the very least, a favorable addition to Lehman's body of work, and at its best, a reminder to all of the psychic depth that exists within us, a reminder of those more pensive and solemn regions often relegated to our unconscious or cloaked in less than compelling verse. Clearly it was time for Lehman to visit these locations and the result is this collection of unusually reflective, lyrical, and provocative verse.

I used to look at the card players or the swimmer
in Cezanne or the supper at Emmaus in Rembrandt
and I thought if a poem could do that, could make that happen,
I would conduct the words on the page the way
Beethoven conducted the orchestra, with his back
to the audience, indifferent to praise or blame.

Scribner, 2005
ISBN: 0-74-325594-1
144 pages, $17.00 (paperback)