Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005

by Landis Everson, Ben Mazer (Editor)

The remarkable discovery of Landis Everson, first winner of The Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award
I stay upright.
Nothing makes me go down dusty roads to change my style.
I don't believe in love anymore, the foghorn
blasted it out of me.
―from "Coronado Poet" "Why did Landis Everson stop writing poetry for forty-three years?" asks The New York Times in a recent feature article. This question permeates Everson's extraordinary first book, Everything Preserved , which collects poems written between 1955 and 1960 and, after a long silence, poems written between 2003 and 2005.
A friend of the poets Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer, Everson became a significant figure of the Berkeley Renaissance in the 1940s and 1950s, which rebelled against the strictures of formalism to bring the poet's unmediated mind onto the page. After the group disbanded, Everson stopped writing for more than four decades, but at the prompting of editor and poet Ben Mazer, he began writing the vivid, spontaneous, and marvelous poems of the last few years.
Selected by The Poetry Foundation from more than 1,100 submissions, Everything Preserved is the debut winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, which recognizes an American poet over the age of fifty who has yet to publish a book of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I try to describe you to the river. I say you're a snag—
Something the river can understand—catching my heart,
That I'm rowing without oars, that this is some trip,
Never able to leave you, bracing hard against swirls

That confuse me, that the whole ghostly place seems like a trap
Without bait, that nothing arrives anyplace near
Where you and I once wanted to be.
*
It's getting late now and
Nothing's sold, nothing wound down, nothing stopped at all.
And our love for our ghosts exhausts us.
*
I guess love first requires empty arms
with a sun between them
before clouds start to fill spaces
*
My letters are beginning to resemble love.
Lost undelivered
No return address
kissed shut.
*
How often we build things
that are not meant as intended
[...]
Like a need for necessity
or the hope for hopelessness
a relationship ends in smoke and mirrors with
sun spiked on the red spire
of a sundial,

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the earlier stuff in here. Not as into the later poems but still a good read.
“I try to describe you to the river. I say you’re a snag—
Something the river can understand— catching my heart” suchhhh a good line

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The organization of this book is idiosyncratic, in part thanks to the huge gap of 43 years in which Everson was not an active poet, and in part thanks to the editors who had the vision to still join his early work with recent efforts all in a single volume. You can imagine that a 43 year period of lying fallow would change any poet, and it is true for Everson; there are fairly significant shifts between the early and late poetry. And the volume itself is weighted towards the late, with only 22 of the 105 pages dedicated to the early poems. This can make the whole book feel awkward at times, misaligned, and odd. Which I now choose to view as a benefit to the reader and a credit to the poet and his publishers. I'm a little tired of the idea that book must be perfectly balanced, perfectly unified, and all cut of the same cloth. This book demonstrates instead that poetry can (should) be a manifold and varied thing, something that can remain silent for four decades and resurge in new forms.

Besides all that, I often found myself pleased and happy in the midst of reading; this is something I value.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it's safe to say that some of the very best American poetry of the last decade was written by a suicidal octogenarian. Whenever I dip into this book I'm astonished anew. It's almost criminal that "Book of Valentines," the collection he put together after this one, remains unpublished.

[Roberto Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is clear from reading Everson's newer poems that he read and thought heavily about the poetry written today. At times he pokes fun at and questions contemporary poetry. I enjoyed this collection. It's surreal, pragmatic and at times frustrated. A good read.

[Jenni · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was Okay.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous specificity. Deceptively unsimple. Ironic, self deprecating. Lovely. Intimate.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should spend more time with this one... this rating is after a quick read.

[Kyle Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poetry, but so sad. There is a clear pain in his voice in all that he writes.