The Dollmaker's Ghost

by Larry Levis

A reissuing of The Dollmaker’s Ghost, poetry by Larry Levis.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Fiction

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1981

About the author

Larry Patrick Levis was born in Fresno, California, on September 30, 1946. His father was a grape grower, and in his youth Levis drove a tractor, pruned vines, and picked grapes in Selma, California. He earned a bachelor's degree from Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) in 1968, a master's degree from Syracuse University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1974.

Among his honors were a YM-YWHA Discovery Award, three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Levis died of a heart attack in 1996, at the age of 49.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the poetry book that kept me writing poems, just to reach towards being this kind of writer. There is one poem with the line, "who are ashamed/by now, to have shoulders..." It's a terrible reference out of context, but you know, it has stayed with me for 18 years.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorites:

The Future of Hands
To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, NY, 1969
Overhearing the Dollmaker's Ghost on the Riverbank
To a Woman Glancing Up from the River
Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard
The Wish to Be Picked Clean

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conjures eloquent, surrealistic images of death and decay. Hallucinatory in nature these poems are soul transforming in that they practically hum with the forlorn quality of life when hope has flown away...Especially meaningful for me (among all the others) was the last poem in the book, "The Spirit Says, You Are Nothing:

[Jacob]

“But you were young, and you had
Plenty of time:
Going west,

You slept on the train and did not smile.
Under you the plains widened, and turned silver.

You slept with your mouth open.

You were nothing,
You were snow falling through the ribs
Of the dead.

You were all I had.”

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

HIS THIRD BOOK, first published by Dutton in 1981. The edition I read is a "Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary" reprint, which appeared in 1992. My copy must be later than that, though, as the back cover copy refers to Levis's death in 1996. The book is still in print, which means it must still be finding readers twenty-eight years after Levis's passing--good to know.

The collection previous to this one, The Afterlife (1977), was the first of Levis's books I read, and the difference between that book and this one felt large. The Afterlife was by no means a light-hearted or sunny book, but it had streaks of whimsy and spots of hope in it. The Dollmaker's Ghost feels bleaker. A lot of it seems to inhabit rural spaces or those small, nearly deserted towns scattered on the highways between Iowa City and Fresno. It feels lonely.

From the reading around I have done since I read The Afterlife, I know that Levis wrote much of it in the happier years of his marriage to poet Marcia Southwick. But something seems to have already gone awry in Part One, which finds Levis back on his parents' grape-growing operation, haunted by memories of his growing up and wondering where he lost the plot.

The book has a lot of retrospection in it. Levis's last, posthumously published work is mainly retrospection, I would say--all those elegies--but it's a little different here, more about being haunted by old photographs and drifting smoke as well as by actual ghosts, who show up often in Part Four (e.g., the dollmaker of the title).

Here are some lines from one of the poems in Part Four, "Some Ashes Drifting Above Piedra, California":


And now,
if we listen for their laughter,
Which vanished fifteen years ago
Into the cleft wood of these boards,
Into the night and the rain,
It will sound like cold jewels spilling together,
It will sound like snow...
We will never have any money, either,
And we will go on staring past the sink,
Past the curtain,
And into a field which is not even white anymore,
Not even an orchard,
But simply this mud,
And always,
Over that, a hard sky.

The "they" are the farm workers who used to live in the shack the speaker is describing. I'm not sure who the "we" could be, but I suspect the other person acknowledged in that "we" is not actually physically present in the shack with the speaker, because he seems really, really alone.

[Prince Jhonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earthy

[lonner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literally some of the best poems I have ever read. Levis is remarkable.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

*End Year: Best Poetry Read in 2019

*4.5.

[Michael Gossett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Levis, of course, is always great; this is his first book, however, and his coming-of-age and the presence of Phil Levine as a mentor is pretty obvious. Fascinating to see the germs of Levis's later (and lasting) voice in some of these early pieces.