The Selected Levis

by Larry Levis

Book Overview

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 "the 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." Each of his books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822957930
• ISBN13: 9780822957935
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.8" x 11.4"

Customer Reviews

Indispensible

What can I possibly say about this poet? He is beyond. This book will mess you up in all the best ways. You won't regret it.

Gathers inspirational and moving verse

Now in a newly revised edition that includes verses from "Elegy", Larry Levis' (1946-1996) final collection of poetry, The Selected Levis, gathers inspirational and moving verse whose lyrical, picturesque wording evokes an atmosphere all its own -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes bleak and dark. But some things are not possible on the earth./And that is why people make poems about the dead./And the dead watch over them, until they are finished:/Until their hands feel like glass on the page,/And snow collects in the blind eyes of statues.

errata

I'd like to make a correction to my review--when I wrote this I was so excited about the collection that I wasn't thinking straight! There are no poems from his last full collection, Elegy in here; the Selected Poems ends with the Widening Spell of the Leaves. I didn't mean to misrepresent this volume. But if you've never read any Levis before, buy the selected, and buy Elegy, and work from there.

As good as it gets

I think it was Michael Levenson who said that "It's easy to have an opinion, but so hard to write a sentence that counts." Nearly every one of Levis's sentences counted, through a deep and original sense of line and a voice that easily alternated between the fierce and tender. Except perhaps from his first book, nearly everything that Levis wrote resonated--he's one of the best, and sadly, one of the most underrated, of the poets of the 80s and 90s. He did this by creating new KINDS of poems; the cadences (particularly in his later books) are singularly his, and tonally the poems can be elegaic, or funny, but they're not just "feelings put on paper." His poems aren't merely glib, vague confessional prose broken up arbitrarily into lines, as seems to be trendy lately. Tonally they might vary from the elegaic to the absurdly funny--but they are all part of a deep exploration by Levis of human experience. He is often rooted in regional soil (the hardscrabble California vineyards of his childhood) but he is not a "regional" writer; in other words, whatever his experiences in life might be, he uses poetry as a way to transform them, merely than just describe them. He can write a poem about Belgrade, and have the same type of unbounded imagery, rhythms, and lyrical force than he has writing about "home."Perhaps the greatest poems here are the Elegies from his last book, in which the elegies themselves become kind of semiautonomous creatures in of themselves (the titles say much to this regard: "Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the cage," "Elegy with a Petty Thief in the Rigging," "Elegy with an Angel inside its gate," etc), and are probably the best sequence of poems I've seen in a long long time.In short, this is a fine introduction to Levis's work--but if you're hooked, you're going to want all of his books anyway (most of which are thankfully in-print by both Pittsburgh and Carneige Mellon). It has been awfully hard to pin down in words what makes his work so special, because in many ways, just like his poems, it defies easy categorization. His poems don't necessarily provide nice morals at the end; they aren't sugar-coated. But I can't think of another poet--even Sylvia Plath, whose work I love--who I regret (grieve, really) had died an early death. With any luck a hundred years from now people will be reading, passionately, Levis's work.