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Elegy
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 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."
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Larry Levis
33 books56 followersLarry 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
November 4, 2013
This would've been one of the best volumes of poetry I've read in a long time but for the middle section. There seems to be something for the Baby Boomer Generation of American poets that compelled them to try and imaginatively inhabit and write from the basest instincts of murderers, rapists, and just your general human monsters. Levis joins poets like Ai, Stephen Dobyns, Carolyn Forche, and even Frank Bidart in this effort to try and bring a poetic sensibility to rendering moments of torture and abysmal destruction into the light of day--a kind of surreal naturalism that reads like Quinten Tarantino on the page (sans the obnoxious sophomoric tone of whimsy). I guess these are supposed to be noble attempts to sublimate the most depraved human behavior imaginable into something redeeming (to his credit, Levis doesn't indulge in Tarantino's maniacal historical revisionist fantasies), but for me this type of poetry more often than not just ends up giving the reader a depraved and weary experience (writing about forcing a friendly couple working as record store keepers to drink Drano after raping the woman in front of her boyfriend, as one poem in Levis' middle section does, is simply wearying in its pointless details and in its utter depravity).
Luckily, the other two sections of Levis' final book are much more engaging and (as the title suggests) have a poignant elegiac tone about reaching middle age and trying to find beauty and purpose that will somehow sustain life. In a poem about the Cumaean Sibyl whom Apollo granted eternal life to but not eternal youth, "Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage," Levis asks:
"What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?
When you turn & there is only the light filling the empty window?
When the angel fasting inside you has grown so thin it flies
Out of you a last time without your
Knowing it, & the water dries up in its thimble, & the one swing
In the cage comes to rest after its almost imperceptible,
Almost endless, swaying?"
It's a sobering set of images and questions and I, for one, appreciate the lengths to which Levis strained to bring a lyrical voice to a condition that seems to have depleted any belief or hope in lyricism. It seems like an inspired moment that Levis was able to inhabit quiet a few times to write some really amazing poems ("The Two Trees," "In 1967," "The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.," Anastasia & Sandman," "Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand," & "Elegy for Poe with the Music of a Carnival Inside It" -- as well as the Elegy quoted above -- are all excellent poems), though it must have been a wrenching experience to simultaneously feel so much hopelessness but beauty at the same time. Highly recommend these sections to anyone who is interested in post-50s American poetry.
Luckily, the other two sections of Levis' final book are much more engaging and (as the title suggests) have a poignant elegiac tone about reaching middle age and trying to find beauty and purpose that will somehow sustain life. In a poem about the Cumaean Sibyl whom Apollo granted eternal life to but not eternal youth, "Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage," Levis asks:
"What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?
When you turn & there is only the light filling the empty window?
When the angel fasting inside you has grown so thin it flies
Out of you a last time without your
Knowing it, & the water dries up in its thimble, & the one swing
In the cage comes to rest after its almost imperceptible,
Almost endless, swaying?"
It's a sobering set of images and questions and I, for one, appreciate the lengths to which Levis strained to bring a lyrical voice to a condition that seems to have depleted any belief or hope in lyricism. It seems like an inspired moment that Levis was able to inhabit quiet a few times to write some really amazing poems ("The Two Trees," "In 1967," "The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.," Anastasia & Sandman," "Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand," & "Elegy for Poe with the Music of a Carnival Inside It" -- as well as the Elegy quoted above -- are all excellent poems), though it must have been a wrenching experience to simultaneously feel so much hopelessness but beauty at the same time. Highly recommend these sections to anyone who is interested in post-50s American poetry.
October 22, 2009
Every time I read this book, I feel how much a tragedy it is that Levis didn't get to call this mss complete, if only because of the few rusty spots, and if only because of the outrageous departure this book is from Widening Spell that was published only four years previous. The feeling of human futility may carry from one book to the next, and I personally find the poems in Widening Spell have a scope of ambition to them that is beyond what this book is striving for. But I appreciate the breadth of subject matter here. And the full engagement with this sentiment as it plays out in each of the narratives.
September 16, 2011
If not his best, his second best (behind 'The Widening Spell...'). A posthumous collection, 'Elegy' stands as just that to its tremendous author. Levis is, without question, my favorite contemporary poet.
"Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand"
"Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It"
"Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand"
"Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It"
Read
January 21, 2021I saw the poem "Boy in Video Arcade" on Twitter and loved it, so I bought this collection. On the whole, I was a bit disappointed, as I didn't like the rest of the poems as much as I thought I would. However, there were some really lovely lines and images. I think it's interesting that these poems were published after his death and unedited - I'm curious to know what he would have changed / how he would have revised them.
My favorites:
- Boy in Video Arcade
- Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage
- Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope
My favorites:
- Boy in Video Arcade
- Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage
- Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope
May 27, 2009
Larry Levis died suddenly in May of 1996 and it was a great loss for contemporary poetry. There is no way to measure how many more poems he would be writing if he were still alive. Elegy was his final collection of poems and a good enough collection that it makes me sad that Levis will write no more. With that said, however, I think it’s good to realize that the book is a little uneven and to understand how that could happen.
Phil Levine put the collection together from notes and poems that Levis left behind. To Levine’s credit, he resisted the urge to revise or rewrite anything. To the discomfort of the reader that means some of what we read is not Larry at his best. Most good poets, and I think he was a great one, live in a state of constant revision. It’s impossible for an editor to gauge when a poem is finally finished. For a poet, it may never be finally finished, but we may eventually let it go. I had the feeling that, with some of these poems, Levis may not have been ready to let them go.
He was always a writer with tremendous imagistic range and the ability to leap time and space without losing a reader. I remember one poem in particular that begins with him looking at a Carvaggio painting, traveling through Carvaggio’s debauched life, Levis’ high school days, the loss of a friend in Vietnam, and ending back in front of the painting. It’s a remarkable piece and at no time during the reading of that poem does the reader ever lose his way or question how the poet gets from one place to the next.
You can sense this same genius in many of the poems in Elegy. Some of them, though, seem to leap in one direction or another and never come back. They just keep on leaping into a vague dimension that we’d rather not be in ourselves. Boy in the Arcade and Anastasia & Sandman are notably examples of this. I’m not saying that these inconsistencies ruin the collection. They don’t, by any means. I’m saying that Phil Levine did the best he could, but no one can read a dead man’s mind.
When you come across a poem like Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate, which does all the things a Levis poem usually does brilliantly, it’s much easier to notice the less complete quality of some of the others. Reading such disconnected lines as “we were never the color blind grasses” – “And one by one we vanished from the place/ vanished by becoming part/ of everyone, part of the horses bending/ their necks to graze, part of every law/ part of each Apache heirloom for sale/ in a window, part of a wedding cake/ part of the smallpox epidemic, part of God….” and then jumping to Carl Marx, sugarcane in Cuba and what happened to Larry Doyle, how he went to hell in an Easter basket, might drive you crazy until seven pages later when the last line of the poem hooks up perfectly with the first and you emerge from the world of Larry Levis knowing exactly where you’ve been and why and wishing that you could someday go back.
May 30, 2019
EXCERPTS:
The point is to live beyond all jurisdiction,
To be the uncountable stars again, the shape
Of the animal running through tall grass.
-
I'm going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk
I'm bent over until it's infinite,
I'm going to make it talk, I'm going to make it
Confess everything.
-
What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?
When you turn & there is only the light filling the empty windows?
-
I think the above lines radically beautiful. I finally read this book because Marianne Boruch's article "Poetry's Over and Over" (originally in APR, then collected) discusses his control of sentence and line. Sometimes the poems feel dated, sure, but the expansiveness of the collection, the beauty of long lines, and the unity of the collection impress me. He manages despair without being sardonic, hateful, ironic. It's pleasurable to read such an agreeably depressing collection that shifts tone so little. Also, of note are some moves -- sequences progressing through motifs rather than narrative and/or temporal and the "meta" moment of the above staring. If you want more on him, Blackbird did a feature, and there's a recent doc, A Late Style of Fire, you can get through your local library or university membership.
The point is to live beyond all jurisdiction,
To be the uncountable stars again, the shape
Of the animal running through tall grass.
-
I'm going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk
I'm bent over until it's infinite,
I'm going to make it talk, I'm going to make it
Confess everything.
-
What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?
When you turn & there is only the light filling the empty windows?
-
I think the above lines radically beautiful. I finally read this book because Marianne Boruch's article "Poetry's Over and Over" (originally in APR, then collected) discusses his control of sentence and line. Sometimes the poems feel dated, sure, but the expansiveness of the collection, the beauty of long lines, and the unity of the collection impress me. He manages despair without being sardonic, hateful, ironic. It's pleasurable to read such an agreeably depressing collection that shifts tone so little. Also, of note are some moves -- sequences progressing through motifs rather than narrative and/or temporal and the "meta" moment of the above staring. If you want more on him, Blackbird did a feature, and there's a recent doc, A Late Style of Fire, you can get through your local library or university membership.
April 12, 2015
Some of these poems were almost unbearably depressing: "Heaven was neither the light nor was it the air, & if it took a physical form/It was splintered lumber no one could build anything with." (from "Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand") Well written, but dark.
January 9, 2012
This book is simply superb. I should have read it when I first started writing poems. If you haven't read it, do so. Immediately.
December 11, 2012
someone in my class said, "i love this because i know how to feel at the end of each poem." i died and was buried inside of a box made of pelican eyelashes ever since.
September 17, 2024
THIS IS THE FIRST of the two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, edited by his teacher and friend, the late Philip Levine. It's very strong--the strongest of the three books by Levis I have read, I would say.
The collections with nine poems titled "Elegy...," e.g. "Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It" and "Elegy with an Angel at its Gate." There are two similarly titled poems in The Darkening Trapeze (the second posthumous collection), and in the afterword to that book David St. John speculates that Levis had in mind making his own version of the Duino Elegies. That would be worth bringing out, if any enterprising publisher is interested. All eleven are ambitious, unnervingly dark, but powerful, and the cumulative impact if published as a stand-alone book would be large, I suspect.
The "Elegy" poems are mainly memory poems, naturally, conjuring up the vanished, or maybe they are not conjuring up the ghosts so much as they are haunted by them. There are some good memories, like the work Levis did alongside the farmworkers in his father's vineyard, but the poems are all in the key of loss, and some are staggering.
What are we but what we offer up?
Gifts we give, for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.
Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber ball
In the photograph I have of him, head on the table & resting his cheek
Against the cool surface of the ball, the one that is finished spinning, the one
He won't give back.
The "him" in the photograph: Levis's son? Levis himself? Oblivion? The ball has completed its movement and is at rest, but is gone, irretrievably gone, as the child is too, another example of "time's relentless melt," as Sontag says all photographs are. Nothing remains of what we offer up save that we did, indeed, offer it up.
Yet we still have these poems, and the poems are not nothing.
The collections with nine poems titled "Elegy...," e.g. "Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It" and "Elegy with an Angel at its Gate." There are two similarly titled poems in The Darkening Trapeze (the second posthumous collection), and in the afterword to that book David St. John speculates that Levis had in mind making his own version of the Duino Elegies. That would be worth bringing out, if any enterprising publisher is interested. All eleven are ambitious, unnervingly dark, but powerful, and the cumulative impact if published as a stand-alone book would be large, I suspect.
The "Elegy" poems are mainly memory poems, naturally, conjuring up the vanished, or maybe they are not conjuring up the ghosts so much as they are haunted by them. There are some good memories, like the work Levis did alongside the farmworkers in his father's vineyard, but the poems are all in the key of loss, and some are staggering.
What are we but what we offer up?
Gifts we give, for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.
Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber ball
In the photograph I have of him, head on the table & resting his cheek
Against the cool surface of the ball, the one that is finished spinning, the one
He won't give back.
The "him" in the photograph: Levis's son? Levis himself? Oblivion? The ball has completed its movement and is at rest, but is gone, irretrievably gone, as the child is too, another example of "time's relentless melt," as Sontag says all photographs are. Nothing remains of what we offer up save that we did, indeed, offer it up.
Yet we still have these poems, and the poems are not nothing.
November 13, 2019
Edit:
Book fourteen of my 2019 reread project.
I am always surprised when I look up these older favorite books here and see that I never did write a review for them. I realize that so many of them predate Goodreads for me but I do wish that I had some initial thoughts to look at as I sit down to put together my thoughts on rereading them decades later. This one was published in 1997 which would have been right around the time that I was voraciously devouring anything and everything that was written by Levis so I have to assume that I bought and read this one first when it came out. That puts this reading a couple of decades past my initial reading (though I am sure I have read it other times in between. I remember when I moved to New York having to select one small box of books to take with me and all of Larry Levis’ books came – there was absolutely no question there in my mind.)
Two decades. I really don’t want to even think about that. But as I read these poems, as I saw which pages were and were not folded down, which lines were and were not highlighted (yes, I am horrible to books) I found myself thinking a lot about that young man who was reading these words for the first time.
Elegy was in a way one of my least favorite Larry Levis books when I was young. (Still, the least favorite among my favorite poet are masterpieces in my opinion so it is a bit of an odd distinction, perhaps.) It is a more dense Levis experience. The poems are longer and they meander, finding ways to and from their central meanings. I’ll say more about this later, but the poems are tougher to get through at points and become almost an experience if you let them. It is this patience, this letting the poems take you that I think was tougher for me as a young person. (and why I really wish I had notes that I had written much earlier as to how I felt about these books.)
Looking at this book, I had many pages marked and folded in the first half but the second half had almost no pages marked. It is this second half where Levis really gets into some heavy work. The poems are much longer and they wander through some dark (both personal – heavily personal – and bigger more universal) stuff. They are really rewarding poems but they take a good bit more work from the reader. They return to moments and themes from earlier in the book and deepen them while also turning them to something else. They reward a slow, careful reading.
Let me tell you, slow careful reading is not something that I am great at. I love strong, surprising lines, wordplay, threaded meaning… I love it all. But I am not very good at being that careful reader. I read fast and though I try to slow myself down more when I am reading poetry, I do not often manage it. (I was worse when I was younger, though, believe me…) This makes it a fun experience for me to return to dense works like these because I missed things that I found this time. (My crummy memory helps with this as well. Ha.) This last section of Elegy illustrates this better than a lot of books perhaps as I found myself absolutely entranced by these later, longer poems.
I loved the way that these threads (particularly these two horses who sort of find their way throughout the entire book) would reappear, deepening each time that they did. I loved how these longer poems would wrestle with personal memory - its trustworthiness (or lack thereof) wow wandering in and out of collapsing civilizations and weave these disparate (and desperate) lines together into something so absolutely beautifully.
I also loved (Oh my goodness, I could go on and on. Who knows if anyone reads these long meandering reviews or cares at all but…) the way that the poet here always is struggling with himself, with how much he wants to say. In Anastasia and Sandman (about those two aforementioned horses), the entire second stanza is
I refuse to explain.
That is freaking powerful – the poet refusing to explain why the horse drinking from the trough is holy. But what is more fascinating – and human – is that he does, indeed, go on to explain. This recurs throughout especially the later poems, this idea. In Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope, the second section begins:
I don’t feel like explaining it,
And now I have to.
I absolutely adore these moments. This is a poet, in a very real sense, being torn two directions by his own poetry. (throwing in a metaphor for being drawn and quartered by his own verse would be a little too on the nose considering the horses, but I thought about it…)
At any rate, Larry Levis is a genius. He wrote poetry that this young college boy could read and get an emotional gut punch from and those same poems can mean something so different to a man a couple of decades removed from that boy. In Elegy, Levis is writing at the end of his life (I am unaware if he knew that he was writing at the end of his life though certainly there feels like there was a knowledge of a coming ending in these poems) about himself decades earlier, about memory how it is both infallible and very much untrustworthy. It is a gorgeous book that has definitely grown with me.
Disregard my ramblings but do yourself a favor and read some Larry Levis, wherever you are in life. He is a poet that is without equal.
Book fourteen of my 2019 reread project.
I am always surprised when I look up these older favorite books here and see that I never did write a review for them. I realize that so many of them predate Goodreads for me but I do wish that I had some initial thoughts to look at as I sit down to put together my thoughts on rereading them decades later. This one was published in 1997 which would have been right around the time that I was voraciously devouring anything and everything that was written by Levis so I have to assume that I bought and read this one first when it came out. That puts this reading a couple of decades past my initial reading (though I am sure I have read it other times in between. I remember when I moved to New York having to select one small box of books to take with me and all of Larry Levis’ books came – there was absolutely no question there in my mind.)
Two decades. I really don’t want to even think about that. But as I read these poems, as I saw which pages were and were not folded down, which lines were and were not highlighted (yes, I am horrible to books) I found myself thinking a lot about that young man who was reading these words for the first time.
Elegy was in a way one of my least favorite Larry Levis books when I was young. (Still, the least favorite among my favorite poet are masterpieces in my opinion so it is a bit of an odd distinction, perhaps.) It is a more dense Levis experience. The poems are longer and they meander, finding ways to and from their central meanings. I’ll say more about this later, but the poems are tougher to get through at points and become almost an experience if you let them. It is this patience, this letting the poems take you that I think was tougher for me as a young person. (and why I really wish I had notes that I had written much earlier as to how I felt about these books.)
Looking at this book, I had many pages marked and folded in the first half but the second half had almost no pages marked. It is this second half where Levis really gets into some heavy work. The poems are much longer and they wander through some dark (both personal – heavily personal – and bigger more universal) stuff. They are really rewarding poems but they take a good bit more work from the reader. They return to moments and themes from earlier in the book and deepen them while also turning them to something else. They reward a slow, careful reading.
Let me tell you, slow careful reading is not something that I am great at. I love strong, surprising lines, wordplay, threaded meaning… I love it all. But I am not very good at being that careful reader. I read fast and though I try to slow myself down more when I am reading poetry, I do not often manage it. (I was worse when I was younger, though, believe me…) This makes it a fun experience for me to return to dense works like these because I missed things that I found this time. (My crummy memory helps with this as well. Ha.) This last section of Elegy illustrates this better than a lot of books perhaps as I found myself absolutely entranced by these later, longer poems.
I loved the way that these threads (particularly these two horses who sort of find their way throughout the entire book) would reappear, deepening each time that they did. I loved how these longer poems would wrestle with personal memory - its trustworthiness (or lack thereof) wow wandering in and out of collapsing civilizations and weave these disparate (and desperate) lines together into something so absolutely beautifully.
I also loved (Oh my goodness, I could go on and on. Who knows if anyone reads these long meandering reviews or cares at all but…) the way that the poet here always is struggling with himself, with how much he wants to say. In Anastasia and Sandman (about those two aforementioned horses), the entire second stanza is
I refuse to explain.
That is freaking powerful – the poet refusing to explain why the horse drinking from the trough is holy. But what is more fascinating – and human – is that he does, indeed, go on to explain. This recurs throughout especially the later poems, this idea. In Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope, the second section begins:
I don’t feel like explaining it,
And now I have to.
I absolutely adore these moments. This is a poet, in a very real sense, being torn two directions by his own poetry. (throwing in a metaphor for being drawn and quartered by his own verse would be a little too on the nose considering the horses, but I thought about it…)
At any rate, Larry Levis is a genius. He wrote poetry that this young college boy could read and get an emotional gut punch from and those same poems can mean something so different to a man a couple of decades removed from that boy. In Elegy, Levis is writing at the end of his life (I am unaware if he knew that he was writing at the end of his life though certainly there feels like there was a knowledge of a coming ending in these poems) about himself decades earlier, about memory how it is both infallible and very much untrustworthy. It is a gorgeous book that has definitely grown with me.
Disregard my ramblings but do yourself a favor and read some Larry Levis, wherever you are in life. He is a poet that is without equal.
January 1, 2022
"Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It" is fantastic...my favorite overall in this collection.
August 29, 2012
I love Levis. Leaving a star off since this work was compiled posthumously and the editorial touches are not his.
"The afternoon after he found it,
The music of a keel scrape still in his ears,
Columbus wrote in a journal: Walking under the trees there
Was the most beautiful thing
I have ever seen." It's what he left out of it, out
Of the entry, that looks back in recognition.
Did he mean walking there? Did he mean the empty, shaded
Spaces beneath the trees where he rested
After sending his men off to accomplish some task?
To find a waterfall & a China behind it?
Did he mean someone he saw?
But the entire point of the entry, the impossible
Chore he had assigned the men,
Was to be left alone there,
With the sky washed clean above him, with the sun
Burning through all its likenesses
To be what it is, by erasing them."
-from Elegy with a Petty Thief in the Rigging
"The afternoon after he found it,
The music of a keel scrape still in his ears,
Columbus wrote in a journal: Walking under the trees there
Was the most beautiful thing
I have ever seen." It's what he left out of it, out
Of the entry, that looks back in recognition.
Did he mean walking there? Did he mean the empty, shaded
Spaces beneath the trees where he rested
After sending his men off to accomplish some task?
To find a waterfall & a China behind it?
Did he mean someone he saw?
But the entire point of the entry, the impossible
Chore he had assigned the men,
Was to be left alone there,
With the sky washed clean above him, with the sun
Burning through all its likenesses
To be what it is, by erasing them."
-from Elegy with a Petty Thief in the Rigging
July 22, 2014
Elegy is a posthumous collection of Larry Levis' poetry collected by his friend and fellow poet Phillip Levine. Many of the poems are in fact elegies, not just to people, but to horses, ideas, and places.
The poems are lovely and heartbreaking when you realize that we won't see any more of Levis' work. But one wonders if this is the collection Levis would have wanted to come out. Many of the poems, especially the elegies, feel unfinished, too long, unedited by a careful eye and hand. While death creeps throughout most of the poems in this collection, it doesn't necessarily feel like there's an overall arc, some poems stick out in places and one wonders why they were put there in the first place.
A lovely example of the poet's work, but not necessarily the most successfully collected.
The poems are lovely and heartbreaking when you realize that we won't see any more of Levis' work. But one wonders if this is the collection Levis would have wanted to come out. Many of the poems, especially the elegies, feel unfinished, too long, unedited by a careful eye and hand. While death creeps throughout most of the poems in this collection, it doesn't necessarily feel like there's an overall arc, some poems stick out in places and one wonders why they were put there in the first place.
A lovely example of the poet's work, but not necessarily the most successfully collected.
March 16, 2009
Levis used to teach at the University of Utah, so some of these poems are set in Utah (my home state). I love reading poetry and prose that is set in Utah, because it tends to have such a naturalistic bent. We are in that wild, "untamed west," after all, and my childhood in Utah was filled with snow-covered mountains and red rock deserts. I know what it is to love a pine tree or a piece of prehistoric stone with such intensity. Levis' poems use nature in such interesting ways--subtly and thematically, like background music.
March 2, 2013
There is a blueprint of something never finished, something I'll never
Find my way out of, some web where the light rocks, back & forth,
Holding me in a time that's gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold
Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass.
The figure in the hourglass & the body swinging in the rhythm of its work.
The body reclining in bed, forgetting what it is, & who.
While the night goes on with its work, the stars & the shapes they make,
Cold vein in the leaf & in the wind,
What are we but what we offer up?
—"Elegy For Whatever Had a Pattern In It"
Find my way out of, some web where the light rocks, back & forth,
Holding me in a time that's gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold
Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass.
The figure in the hourglass & the body swinging in the rhythm of its work.
The body reclining in bed, forgetting what it is, & who.
While the night goes on with its work, the stars & the shapes they make,
Cold vein in the leaf & in the wind,
What are we but what we offer up?
—"Elegy For Whatever Had a Pattern In It"
April 12, 2016
A poet of images, beautiful, concrete, surprising images.
And the voice, the voice has authority so that the reader sits up and listens. Try reading them aloud - the music of them entrances even when the meaning is not clear. I love "The Cook Grew Lost in His Village, the Village in the Endless Shuffling of Their Cards" poem.
Ultimately it is about death and how prescient is that considering Mr. Levis died unexpectedly in the middle of composing these poems.
I was moved in a way that only the best poetry can.
And the voice, the voice has authority so that the reader sits up and listens. Try reading them aloud - the music of them entrances even when the meaning is not clear. I love "The Cook Grew Lost in His Village, the Village in the Endless Shuffling of Their Cards" poem.
Ultimately it is about death and how prescient is that considering Mr. Levis died unexpectedly in the middle of composing these poems.
I was moved in a way that only the best poetry can.
July 13, 2011
Poet-friends kept recommending this book to me and now I can finally understand why. Yes, yes, yes, yes. These poems are working on so many levels. I was trying to read them as an example of narrative (for an Intro to Poetry class I'm teaching next semester) and love the way they show how expanded web-like luminous narrative (and worlds!) can be.
Side-note/dish: This book taught me more about how to write about violence than so many other books with that explicit intent.
Side-note/dish: This book taught me more about how to write about violence than so many other books with that explicit intent.
April 3, 2007
In my top 5 books of poetry, no question. Larry Levis is a brilliant poet and I am grateful for this book. Read it. He makes the long poem seem short, and for that alone his is a poetic genius... to me, anyway.
January 31, 2008
Oh, Larry. I posthumously adore you. These poems are like houses of cards. Or like a beaver dam. Well-constructed and so much more. I weep at them. Read them or suffer an emptiness that will haunt you until your death.
May 26, 2010
Along with all the other books by Larry Levis, Elegy continues to be a powerful influence and inspiration to all sorts of poets and to all manner of people who love poetry. It's an essential book for anyone who enjoys being seriously engaged with the art of poetry.
January 22, 2014
"The Smell of the Sea" was unnecessarily graphically violent and disturbing. I wish I had never read it. The rest of the book has flashes of excellence akin to [Book:Winter Stars].
May 25, 2008
I lost more than half of my poetry books in a flood. This one was salvaged, and I just reread it. One of my favorite lines: "Arms and wings. They'll mock you one way or the other."
June 5, 2008
A moving, brilliant final collection. I must admit that I haven't read every poem in it because I can't bring myself to know I will never read another new poem by this amazing writer and man.
July 28, 2008
His posthumous collection- read: "Anastasia & Sandman," "Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It," and "Elegy With a Bridle in Its Hand."
February 21, 2011
I'm reading this slowly. Very moving, at times so much so that I can only read one poem at a time. Great book to put next to your bed and read when you can spend some time thinking about each line.
May 8, 2012
Longer poems, but worth the patience. Not difficult reads, just extended imagination required by the reader.
September 4, 2018
Some lovely passages, but it is sadly repetitious, under-edited and overlong.
March 1, 2018
The poems in Larry Levis' posthumous collection are often prosaic and elegaic, merging contemporary and traditional Roman proclivities in poetry. The entries in the collection employ the harsh sentiments and inexplicable violences of the world in flux to cut anachronistic shadows into the face of each poem's remembered or dreamed world. At times Levis recounts historical events or eras from the 20th century and beyond as a conduit for his thieves and despots and wandering souls. The backdrops he constructs, and the tensions gnashing their teeth in each world's shadows, all combine to provide dense, somber meditations on the course of events both personal and historical. Many of the poems are written as elegies for or with the characters he guides through each elegaic couplet, cutting deep to the core of their constituent bodies with rhetorical barbs. His rhetorical turns always broaden each poem and suggest bigger, more fundamental, questions that he never explicitly puts to the page, or as Levis puts it "that [which] looks back in recognition." The poems depict Levis' attention to detail and pervasive endearment with masculine melancholy, his poetic eye fixed to the fleeting meanings in struggle and purpose and adversity.
June 3, 2018
2 1/2 stars actually.
I really wanted to love this book, especially since the poem that brought me to this collection--"Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand"--is one of the best poems I've ever read in my life. And, yes, there are some excellent poems in there, but the first section of the book was instantly forgettable, and the elegies, after a while, became a long, drawn out mess of abstractions and pronouns. I don't mind reading poems several times to get them, but I found these poems tedious and began to resent having to constantly reread them when I didn't enjoy them in the first place.
I really wanted to love this book, especially since the poem that brought me to this collection--"Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand"--is one of the best poems I've ever read in my life. And, yes, there are some excellent poems in there, but the first section of the book was instantly forgettable, and the elegies, after a while, became a long, drawn out mess of abstractions and pronouns. I don't mind reading poems several times to get them, but I found these poems tedious and began to resent having to constantly reread them when I didn't enjoy them in the first place.
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