Selected Levis : Revised Edition

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Levis, Larry.

Contributor:

St. John, David.

Series:

Pitt Poetry Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry.

Local Subjects:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (240 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Edited and with an Afterword by David St. JohnWhen 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 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). "It 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."-; from the Afterword, by David St. John

Contents:

""Contents""; ""Wrecking Crew""; ""The Poem You Asked For""; ""Magician Poems""; ""L.A., Loiterings""; ""For Stones""; ""Fish""; ""For the Country""; ""The Town""; ""Maybe the Dead""; ""Unfinished Poem""; ""The Afterlife""; ""Rhododendrons""; ""The Double""; ""Signs""; ""Inventing the Toucan""; ""Readings in French""; ""A Poem of Horses""; ""The Crimes of the Shade Trees""; ""Linnets""; ""The Dollmaker's Ghost""; ""Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard""; ""The Ownership of the Night""; ""To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969""; ""Truman, Da Vinci, Nebraska""

""The Cry""""Winter Stars""; ""Irish Music""; ""Family Romance""; ""Though His Name Is Infinite, My Father Is Asleep""; ""Childhood Ideogram""; ""In the City of Light""; ""My Story in a Late Style of Fire""; ""After the Blue Note Closes""; ""Whitman:""; ""Some Grass along a Ditch Bank""; ""Two Variations on a Theme by Kobayashi""; ""Those Graves in Rome""; ""The Assimilation of the Gypsies""; ""Sensationalism""; ""The Widening Spell of the Leaves""; ""The Spell of the Leaves""; ""Sleeping Lioness""; ""Slow Child with a Book of Birds""; ""The Perfection of Solitude: A Sequence""

""To a Wren on Calvary""""The Widening Spell of the Leaves""; ""At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans""; ""Elegy""; ""The Two Trees""; ""In 1967""; ""The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.""; ""Anastasia and Sandman""; ""Shiloh""; ""Boy in Video Arcade""; ""The Smell of the Sea""; ""Elegy with a Petty Thief in the Rigging""; ""Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage""; ""Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand""; ""Elegy for Poe with the Music of a Carnival Inside It""; ""Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope""; ""Afterword by David St. John""

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

ISBN:

9780822991069

0822991063

OCLC:

875637039