Near Hits and Lost Classics

What you won't find in this book: despair, cynicism, bromides, smugness, shortcuts, hypocrisy, insincerity. What you will find: a modern romantic sweep, a staggering erudition, a measure of well-placed idealism, formal inventiveness, and above all, dazzling levels of compassion. This collection of early poems by Quincy R. Lehr finds the poet revisiting his days as the urban pilgrim navigating life and society in the metropolis with the kind of observant wisdom that does not sermonize from mountains but is alive in the moment. This book far surpasses blast-from-the-past status and should be considered essential reading. It will sharpen the textures of the world you see and make you empathize more deeply with humans around you: the ones you knew, the ones you know, the ones you are yet to meet.

Anton Yakovlev

Quincy Lehr is that rare species of writer, an open-eyed storyteller who is both agent and observer. In the wings, sometimes in the lights, maybe ready to enter, maybe not, often obscured or obscuring but always in the stalls, always watching. These poems bristle with a young man's energy and restlessness, lace verve with grief and regret. As they should do. That doesn't mean these are simply confessional scripts. He is too good a poet for dead end weeping. There is a search going on here and an often very funny one. (Early participants, don't be alarmed - he is hardest on himself.) For all the brio, though, the snappy competence and the hip quips, there is a reflective and, in the best possible sense, worried intelligence underneath, where review and revision take place, looking for the connections he may have missed on the path leading to here, hiding concern in bemusement when the answers don't show.

Ross Hattaway

Three guys walk into a tiki bar where Quincy Lehr is reading. He looks vaguely like a deserter from a Warsaw Pact army. He says, "The general is just a joke / At something more particular's expense." He says, "A blind cartographer plots out / The whole in which we try to place each part." He says, "I've got no part in / The pivotal scenes." He finishes. The three guys applaud, cheer, raise the rafters. They buy him a drink which contains rum and a cherry and is topped by a paper parasol. They introduce themselves: Juvenal, Hardy, Eliot. The four talk late into the night. I serve them and pick up the tab myself.

R. S. Gwynn