The Morning Line is David Lehman’s most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity of poems written with candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age. Lehman is a poetic ventriloquist, and he expertly imitates Catullus and Francois Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky’s Cloud in Trousers and Hoelderlin’s Half-Life. The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.