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Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has
been one of the most original and most highly praised of
contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems
and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless
self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances.
What emerges is not merely autobiography, but a biography of the
reader, a \u201crepresentative life\u201d of our time.
Edited and with an Afterword by David St. John When Larry Levis
died suddenly in 1996, Philip Levine wrote that he had years
earlier recognized Levis as \u201cthe most gifted and determined
young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my
classes. . . . His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry,
but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our
lives.\u201d Each of his books was published to wide critical
acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his
work from his first five books: Wrecking Crew (1972), Afterlife
(1976), The Dollmaker’s Ghost (1981), Winter Stars (1985) and The
Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991). \u201cIt is not an
exaggeration to say that the death of Larry Levis in 1996—of a
heart attack at 49—sent a shock wave through the ranks of
American poetry. Not only was Levis a good friend to many poets
(not simply of his own generation but of many poets older and
younger as well), his poetry had become a kind of touchstone for
many of us, a source of special inspiration and awe. With Larry
Levis’ death came the sense that an American original had been
lost. . . . It is not at all paradoxical that he saw both the most
intimate expressions of poetry and the grandest gestures of art, of
language, as constituting individual acts of courage. One can only
hope that, like such courage, Larry Levis’s remarkable poems will
continue to live far into our literature.\u201d—from the
Afterword, by David St. John
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Elegy (Paperback, New)
Larry Levis
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A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his
friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an
all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. Levine had years earlier
recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I
have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after
Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What
emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written
in the six years following publication of his previous book, The
Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz
improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance.
There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an
opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los
Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two
beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian
famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship,
contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates
in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in
which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are
worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it
shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world
in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for
yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there
wasn't." Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our
essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death
is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major
achievement that will enrich our lives."
The result is a book of discursive meditations that will amply
reward the reader. Part travelogue, part pilgrimage in which the
shrines remain hidden until they are recognized later, Larry
Levis’s startling and complex fifth book of poems is about the
enslavement to desire for personal freedom, and the awareness of
its price.
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