Ithaca

Ithaca consists of sixty sonnets divided into two equal parts, "Ithaca" and "Gifts Reserved for Age." In Homer's Odyssey, Ithaca is the island home to which the hero returns after twenty years of war and perilous adventures. In Lehman's "Ithaca" sequence, two phrases are strategically repeated, with variations: "Happy the man who . . ." and "What did he believe in?" In "Gifts Reserved for Age," the restless traveler continues to recollect and make sense of his life. Ultimate questions are raised: Does God exist? Can art redeem reality and not just contrive ways to escape from it? What are the compensatory "gifts" that accompany growing old? Lehman, who has resided for many years in Ithaca, New York, does inventive things with the sonnet as a form and the sonnet sequence as the organizing principle of a unified book. Rich in allusion, not only to Homer's epic but to a shelf of important writers and thinkers, Ithaca is a witty and erudite book for grown-up readers who look to poetry for inspiration, profundity, and intellectual stimulation.

David Lehman was educated at Columbia and Cambridge universities. The Morning Line is the most recent of his poetry collections; his prose books include One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, Sinatra's Century, and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. In 1988 he launched The Best American Poetry and was general editor of the annual anthology series for the next thirty-eight years. Lehman has also edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and a number of anthologies devoted to prose poems, erotic verse, and poetic form. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 2010. He divides his time between New York City and Ithaca, New York.