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The Selected Levis
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 St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five 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
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 St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five 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
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
21 people are currently reading
576 people want to read
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 48 reviews
March 28, 2021
Larry Levis is one of those writers who was robbed by the Fates, who got overanxious and took him at age 50. Sheesh. Still, he's an interesting voice among 20th century American poets and, with this book, an interesting story in terms of his progression as a poet.
The book takes from six collections. The first three offer Levis, a student of Philip Levine's, in a more straight-forward, imagery-bent mode. Most of these poems are shorter, a page or two most, and take in experiences including Levis' own childhood in California. The books selected from here are Wrecking Crew, The Afterlife, and The Dollmaker's Ghost.
The transition comes with the more heavily excerpted collections, Winter Stars, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and the posthumous Elegies. These poems spread their arms and legs and get more comfortable, ruminative, and philosophical. You might even say more "talky," as the lines begin to stretch to Walt Whitman dimensions, leaving the grass, so to speak.
I sometimes got lost in the latter poems's long lines, but certain words and images and even ideas brought be to quick attention again. He was another writer preoccupied with death, but also with youth, with painting (ekphrastic stuff), and with poetry where you slip inside the mind of a character, historical or current. As Levis learned from Levine, we can learn from Levis (even if our last name doesn't begin with an "L").
Example poem for you:
The Poet at Seventeen
Larry Levis
My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying
Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where
I spent it all, extravagantly, believing
My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.
Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,
And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath
When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang
Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;
Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes
Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess,
Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own.
Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish.
I hated high school then, & on weekends drove
A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring
I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone.
Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing,
And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then.
I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings,
The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection
Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy
Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind
Of solitude the world usually allows
Only to kings & criminals who are extinct,
Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow
As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray
Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin
Each autumn, & made that little hell of days—
The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans
Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes
They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders
Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs.
The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared.
And the girls I tried to talk to after class
Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed,
With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment.
Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road.
A life like that? It seemed to go on forever—
Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor
Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October
Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember
The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness
Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend.
And then the first ice hung like spider lattices
Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One,
And then the first dark entering the trees—
And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner,
The way they always seemed afraid of something,
And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.
The book takes from six collections. The first three offer Levis, a student of Philip Levine's, in a more straight-forward, imagery-bent mode. Most of these poems are shorter, a page or two most, and take in experiences including Levis' own childhood in California. The books selected from here are Wrecking Crew, The Afterlife, and The Dollmaker's Ghost.
The transition comes with the more heavily excerpted collections, Winter Stars, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and the posthumous Elegies. These poems spread their arms and legs and get more comfortable, ruminative, and philosophical. You might even say more "talky," as the lines begin to stretch to Walt Whitman dimensions, leaving the grass, so to speak.
I sometimes got lost in the latter poems's long lines, but certain words and images and even ideas brought be to quick attention again. He was another writer preoccupied with death, but also with youth, with painting (ekphrastic stuff), and with poetry where you slip inside the mind of a character, historical or current. As Levis learned from Levine, we can learn from Levis (even if our last name doesn't begin with an "L").
Example poem for you:
The Poet at Seventeen
Larry Levis
My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying
Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where
I spent it all, extravagantly, believing
My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.
Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,
And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath
When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang
Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;
Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes
Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess,
Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own.
Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish.
I hated high school then, & on weekends drove
A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring
I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone.
Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing,
And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then.
I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings,
The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection
Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy
Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind
Of solitude the world usually allows
Only to kings & criminals who are extinct,
Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow
As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray
Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin
Each autumn, & made that little hell of days—
The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans
Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes
They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders
Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs.
The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared.
And the girls I tried to talk to after class
Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed,
With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment.
Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road.
A life like that? It seemed to go on forever—
Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor
Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October
Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember
The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness
Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend.
And then the first ice hung like spider lattices
Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One,
And then the first dark entering the trees—
And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner,
The way they always seemed afraid of something,
And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.
April 15, 2012
There's an old piece advice you can sometimes use in a difficult situation: imagine the worst that could happen. If it's not the end of the world if that worst thing happens, then make your decision knowing you can handle any outcome.
That is the supreme favor that Levis has given us. I'm afraid of death, afraid that I don't really have any sort of grip on it. This is compounded by the fact that I haven't had many objective, detailed conversations or expositions about death with the people in my world other than reading really good authors. It's not a popular topic among secularists.
Levis addresses death in amazingly inventive lines, in poems that take you to many places at once, in imagining the death of love, the death of our country, the death of every dream he had or was supposed to have as a child. A sample from "Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope":
All I have left of that country is this torn scrap
Of engraved lunacy, worth less now
Than it was then, for then it was worth nothing,
Or nothing more than
The dust a wren bathes in,
The fountain dry in the park off the Zeleni Venac,
The needles of the pines dry above it,
The green shutters of the fruitsellers' stands closed
For the afternoon so that in the quiet it seemed
The wren was the only thing moving in the whole city...
By taking us to the end of despair and beyond - the small, drifting void of loneliness, the stifling heroism of war, the control of government so stilted and self-serving that it disappears from the groundings in our individual lives - Levis creates a situation in which the only thing left is the hope of pen and a blank page, the only feeling a tenderness for any kind of gesture that would meaningfully connect one human being's struggles to another's.
In Levis's world, a figure like Don Quixote wouldn't be crazy. He would be someone courageous enough to follow his own imagination. And while Levis poems can be rangy, twisting journeys, he comes back again and again to the same images within a poem in unpredictable ways that surprise the reader and add depth to metaphors whose deepest meanings aren't obvious with only a few stanzas. His language is conversational and often blunt. At the same time he uses repetition, line breaks and varied sentence lengths to add a natural rhythm and an energetic forward flow that carries the reader along.
Reading Larry Levis, one can get past the sincere yet more trite attempts at verse, the comfort food that wishes for the way things could be before the vital first step of recognizing and understanding the way things really are. Accepting death is only the start.
That is the supreme favor that Levis has given us. I'm afraid of death, afraid that I don't really have any sort of grip on it. This is compounded by the fact that I haven't had many objective, detailed conversations or expositions about death with the people in my world other than reading really good authors. It's not a popular topic among secularists.
Levis addresses death in amazingly inventive lines, in poems that take you to many places at once, in imagining the death of love, the death of our country, the death of every dream he had or was supposed to have as a child. A sample from "Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope":
All I have left of that country is this torn scrap
Of engraved lunacy, worth less now
Than it was then, for then it was worth nothing,
Or nothing more than
The dust a wren bathes in,
The fountain dry in the park off the Zeleni Venac,
The needles of the pines dry above it,
The green shutters of the fruitsellers' stands closed
For the afternoon so that in the quiet it seemed
The wren was the only thing moving in the whole city...
By taking us to the end of despair and beyond - the small, drifting void of loneliness, the stifling heroism of war, the control of government so stilted and self-serving that it disappears from the groundings in our individual lives - Levis creates a situation in which the only thing left is the hope of pen and a blank page, the only feeling a tenderness for any kind of gesture that would meaningfully connect one human being's struggles to another's.
In Levis's world, a figure like Don Quixote wouldn't be crazy. He would be someone courageous enough to follow his own imagination. And while Levis poems can be rangy, twisting journeys, he comes back again and again to the same images within a poem in unpredictable ways that surprise the reader and add depth to metaphors whose deepest meanings aren't obvious with only a few stanzas. His language is conversational and often blunt. At the same time he uses repetition, line breaks and varied sentence lengths to add a natural rhythm and an energetic forward flow that carries the reader along.
Reading Larry Levis, one can get past the sincere yet more trite attempts at verse, the comfort food that wishes for the way things could be before the vital first step of recognizing and understanding the way things really are. Accepting death is only the start.
June 6, 2021
reading male poetry is always a mistake
February 6, 2010
I always enjoy seeing how a poet's writing instinct shifts and changes over a lifetime. I heart you, Larry Levis, you are my new favorite.
ps - mme. unnarrator: do you want me to hand this over to you or should I return it to H.L.?
ps - mme. unnarrator: do you want me to hand this over to you or should I return it to H.L.?
November 1, 2011
Levis was, for me, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century: his poems engage the world in all its complexity. Although I always think its best to read the poems in their individual collections, this is a great primer of Levis's work.
March 15, 2008
The stalwartness and elegance of this man's mustache is echoed in every line of his poetry.
December 31, 2016
I find that I can only read so much Levis at a time before my heart starts breaking either from joy or from sadness. This means I read him often!
August 16, 2013
If you have read Levis, you get it--the blanketing sadness, the attention to detail, the impossible to word worded remarkably. If you haven't read Levis, go now do that.
March 11, 2010
One of LL's constant themes is identity. For instance, a poem, "Convalescent Home" from his first collection compares the elderly to animals "licking themselves goodbye" and furthers the comparison "They are the small animals vanishing / at the road's edge everywhere." From his last collection, the speaker of "The Two Trees" questions his own identity: "Everything I have done has come to nothing /
It is not even worth mocking." Many times LL's theme of identity also influences another main topic - romance. "The Two Trees" shows a speaker who has remained a best friend to two trees his entire life. Eventually, even the trees are alienated from him. The poem ends with a tone filled with longing, regret and despair when the gender of one of the trees in revealed along with their failed relationship: "
In the shape of its limbs
As if someone's cries
Had been muffled by them once, concealed there,
Her white flesh just underneath the slowly peeling bark
- while the joggers swerved around me and I stared -
Still tempting me to step in, find her,
And possess here completely.
Lines and images such as "white flesh just underneath slowly peeling bark", the joggers swerving around the speaker without acknowledgement, and her "muffled cries" hidden in a tree all further the theme of identity. The indented last line of the poem stands by itself and thrusts forward his longing and despair from alienation and lack of identity. Indeed, his form is usually free with stanza breaks based on changes of images and/or emphasis; accordingly, he usually breaks lines according to tempo and emphasis. However, in some of his poems he favors long one-stanza poems or very long Whitman-like lines. He is also fond of writing poems in parts.
Levis himself changed his identity as a poet. His early poetry uses highly imaginative, surreal images, but as he grew older, his poems began to become more ground in realism, but with a flair. The aforementioned poem presents the very real images of two trees, their limbs, their colors, and the speaker's emotions are real enough regarding them. Nonetheless, Levis turns the speaker's relationship to the trees into a metaphor for the poem's themes, but even more, the way he describes the woman buried in the tree, and the bark peeling so close in the line to her skin, and the limbs somehow conveying the presence oh her cries, and the speaker's desire to "step in" the tree to "possess" her, all these twisting descriptions and appeals to different senses takes the poem's images to a deeper level by mixing doses of the surreal with realism. But "The Two Trees" remains much more akin to American realism than LL's early poems. Identity and relationships are dealt with in a much more surreal fashion by the speaker of "Unfinished Poem":
I walk the cut road for miles
where the ground is freezing in the name of the father,
and the ghost of the cracked snout, and the dull sons
wielding ax handles in the slaughterhouse Day of Our Lord
ruled by bellies. Ruled by the longing of toys
left under houses for years. Left as offerings. Dust.
Puzzles for the woman turned to a doorstep. Over which
you carried all the dead at the moment of your birth.
In the poem, the woman is "turned to a doorstep" that someone stepped over to carry the dead. There are angry "dull" boys carrying axes on the Lord's Day, which also implies the lower case "father" from the proceeding lines. There is a longing for harmless toys that someone left as an offering but now they have turned to dust. The themes of alienation and identity are present in all of these lines and, like "The Two Trees", another woman has been transformed into an unreachable state.
As some his themes and his imagination remained constant through his life, so did LL's ability to segue within a poem. Characters metamorphosis into different beings, settings change, themes evolve or change, or situations meander through different circumstances until only at the ending is the truth or point of the poem revealed. In his early poem, "For the Country," the subject at the beginning of the poem is a woman who has her blouse removed by a group strangers using a pocketknife. "Pools of rainwater shone in the sunlight, / and they took turns " the speaker tells of their assault on the girl. Part two describes the girl watching pigeons in the rafters and the blue sky "after it was over." Part three begins:
You are the sweet, pregnant,
teenage blonde thrown from the speeding car.
You are a dead, clean-shaven astronaut
orbiting perfectly forever.
You are America.
The poems ends with a couplet: "I am the nicest guy in the world / closing his switchblade and whistling." The subject of the poem has changed from a girl, to an astronaut, to America, to the speaker with the knife. The theme has changed from rape to a counterculture message about America. The poem's scope itself has changed from the personal to the public. And of course the setting is changing from a rustic barn type beginning to a speeding car to space and back. Part 4 places the speaker on a farm riding a tractor - "the teeth if its gears / chatter in a faint language / of mad farmwives who have whittled and sung tunelessly" - around the plum trees as he has done for many years. Part 5 is the last part. The speaker now slumps in a chair and promises to speak no more of " my country" or of his wife's talk about abortions or the birds he is watching. The speaker's last lines tell that he will:
...watch what goes on
behind my eyelids:
stare at he dead horses with flowers stuck in
their moths-
and that is the end of it.
The last two parts present the speaker two more different settings. The scope changes again from the personal to the public. Instead of rape, abortion is now considered - in a roundabout way through his wife and back to the implied rapist. The poem has become a critique of America and the underbelly of gothic country life. Levis ability to cover so much ground in two pages is testimony to his imagination, intellect, AND craftsmanship. By changing the scope, he emphasizes all his themes from the individual to society. He also maintains a closeness and individuality within the poem while tackling broad social issues. His use of segue between the parts in relation to theme makes this poem more than collage or a playground for the imagination. It's both of those as well as being a philosophical treatise on America, rural life, and the family-values myth of rural life.
Levis distinguishes himself as poet who is more than a one trick pony. His use of language, form, imagery, metaphor, segue, etc works on many levels - including the surreal and the everyday. It makes him an American poet unique to both surrealism and to American poets.
It is not even worth mocking." Many times LL's theme of identity also influences another main topic - romance. "The Two Trees" shows a speaker who has remained a best friend to two trees his entire life. Eventually, even the trees are alienated from him. The poem ends with a tone filled with longing, regret and despair when the gender of one of the trees in revealed along with their failed relationship: "
In the shape of its limbs
As if someone's cries
Had been muffled by them once, concealed there,
Her white flesh just underneath the slowly peeling bark
- while the joggers swerved around me and I stared -
Still tempting me to step in, find her,
And possess here completely.
Lines and images such as "white flesh just underneath slowly peeling bark", the joggers swerving around the speaker without acknowledgement, and her "muffled cries" hidden in a tree all further the theme of identity. The indented last line of the poem stands by itself and thrusts forward his longing and despair from alienation and lack of identity. Indeed, his form is usually free with stanza breaks based on changes of images and/or emphasis; accordingly, he usually breaks lines according to tempo and emphasis. However, in some of his poems he favors long one-stanza poems or very long Whitman-like lines. He is also fond of writing poems in parts.
Levis himself changed his identity as a poet. His early poetry uses highly imaginative, surreal images, but as he grew older, his poems began to become more ground in realism, but with a flair. The aforementioned poem presents the very real images of two trees, their limbs, their colors, and the speaker's emotions are real enough regarding them. Nonetheless, Levis turns the speaker's relationship to the trees into a metaphor for the poem's themes, but even more, the way he describes the woman buried in the tree, and the bark peeling so close in the line to her skin, and the limbs somehow conveying the presence oh her cries, and the speaker's desire to "step in" the tree to "possess" her, all these twisting descriptions and appeals to different senses takes the poem's images to a deeper level by mixing doses of the surreal with realism. But "The Two Trees" remains much more akin to American realism than LL's early poems. Identity and relationships are dealt with in a much more surreal fashion by the speaker of "Unfinished Poem":
I walk the cut road for miles
where the ground is freezing in the name of the father,
and the ghost of the cracked snout, and the dull sons
wielding ax handles in the slaughterhouse Day of Our Lord
ruled by bellies. Ruled by the longing of toys
left under houses for years. Left as offerings. Dust.
Puzzles for the woman turned to a doorstep. Over which
you carried all the dead at the moment of your birth.
In the poem, the woman is "turned to a doorstep" that someone stepped over to carry the dead. There are angry "dull" boys carrying axes on the Lord's Day, which also implies the lower case "father" from the proceeding lines. There is a longing for harmless toys that someone left as an offering but now they have turned to dust. The themes of alienation and identity are present in all of these lines and, like "The Two Trees", another woman has been transformed into an unreachable state.
As some his themes and his imagination remained constant through his life, so did LL's ability to segue within a poem. Characters metamorphosis into different beings, settings change, themes evolve or change, or situations meander through different circumstances until only at the ending is the truth or point of the poem revealed. In his early poem, "For the Country," the subject at the beginning of the poem is a woman who has her blouse removed by a group strangers using a pocketknife. "Pools of rainwater shone in the sunlight, / and they took turns " the speaker tells of their assault on the girl. Part two describes the girl watching pigeons in the rafters and the blue sky "after it was over." Part three begins:
You are the sweet, pregnant,
teenage blonde thrown from the speeding car.
You are a dead, clean-shaven astronaut
orbiting perfectly forever.
You are America.
The poems ends with a couplet: "I am the nicest guy in the world / closing his switchblade and whistling." The subject of the poem has changed from a girl, to an astronaut, to America, to the speaker with the knife. The theme has changed from rape to a counterculture message about America. The poem's scope itself has changed from the personal to the public. And of course the setting is changing from a rustic barn type beginning to a speeding car to space and back. Part 4 places the speaker on a farm riding a tractor - "the teeth if its gears / chatter in a faint language / of mad farmwives who have whittled and sung tunelessly" - around the plum trees as he has done for many years. Part 5 is the last part. The speaker now slumps in a chair and promises to speak no more of " my country" or of his wife's talk about abortions or the birds he is watching. The speaker's last lines tell that he will:
...watch what goes on
behind my eyelids:
stare at he dead horses with flowers stuck in
their moths-
and that is the end of it.
The last two parts present the speaker two more different settings. The scope changes again from the personal to the public. Instead of rape, abortion is now considered - in a roundabout way through his wife and back to the implied rapist. The poem has become a critique of America and the underbelly of gothic country life. Levis ability to cover so much ground in two pages is testimony to his imagination, intellect, AND craftsmanship. By changing the scope, he emphasizes all his themes from the individual to society. He also maintains a closeness and individuality within the poem while tackling broad social issues. His use of segue between the parts in relation to theme makes this poem more than collage or a playground for the imagination. It's both of those as well as being a philosophical treatise on America, rural life, and the family-values myth of rural life.
Levis distinguishes himself as poet who is more than a one trick pony. His use of language, form, imagery, metaphor, segue, etc works on many levels - including the surreal and the everyday. It makes him an American poet unique to both surrealism and to American poets.
February 9, 2021
This is a great way into the work of Larry Levis: profound, odd, joyful, and sad. Levis can take you there, and this selected poetry collection gives you enough of a taste of his career for that be apparent.
September 26, 2025
Levis speaks to the reader, tells them a story, and manages to do so with a form that just never ties itself down.
This book feels like a conversation. If you’re willing to listen, Levis will tell you everything.
This book feels like a conversation. If you’re willing to listen, Levis will tell you everything.
August 13, 2008
Poetry. These are selections from Levis' six books of poetry, so there's a good representation of the way his style changed over time. His writing is smooth and slightly dreamy; he's not afraid to hare off after a wild metaphor or spend some time toiling away on a subject that, at first, seems to have nothing to do with the poem you're reading.
This is a huge book, with over 200 pages of poetry, and I had to read it slowly so I didn't become overwhelmed by his constant mentions of vines. Yes, he grew up on a vineyard; it's still just a little too much all at once. I love his style -- his clever line breaks, his flights of fancy, even his sudden tangents that only begin to make sense in the final lines. Every poem in here has something interesting about it, but overall I didn't have too many favorites, and that's how I judge my poets: How many of these poems am I going to read over and over?
So Levis gets three stars, mostly for his style. If it were style alone, he'd be getting four, but I'm taking a point off because I really wanted to find more poems to love. My favorites: "The Poem You Asked For," "L.A., Loiterings," "Readings in French," "In the City of Light," "Whitman," "The Two Trees," and "The Smell of the Sea."
This is a huge book, with over 200 pages of poetry, and I had to read it slowly so I didn't become overwhelmed by his constant mentions of vines. Yes, he grew up on a vineyard; it's still just a little too much all at once. I love his style -- his clever line breaks, his flights of fancy, even his sudden tangents that only begin to make sense in the final lines. Every poem in here has something interesting about it, but overall I didn't have too many favorites, and that's how I judge my poets: How many of these poems am I going to read over and over?
So Levis gets three stars, mostly for his style. If it were style alone, he'd be getting four, but I'm taking a point off because I really wanted to find more poems to love. My favorites: "The Poem You Asked For," "L.A., Loiterings," "Readings in French," "In the City of Light," "Whitman," "The Two Trees," and "The Smell of the Sea."
March 30, 2008
Larry Levis, who passed away at the early age of 50, left behind seven books of poems. Many of these poems are in "The Selected Levis", and this book gives plenty of reasons why Levis was not only a phenomenal poet, but a neccessary one. A former student of Philip Levine, he achieved his voice through the great inspiration from poets such as Levine, James Wright, and many others, yet as his work matured, he become a powerfully individual voice that I will always admire and respect.
November 16, 2017
Larry Levis died suddenly of a heart attack at age 49, taking with him the rest of the poetic heart and mind he had only briefly shared in his collections. The best of Wrecking Crew, The Afterlife, The Dollmaker’s Ghost, Winter Stars, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and Elegy are gathered in this work with an afterword by David St. John. The world of poetry lost a great poet; fortunately, the world will have this collection of his work for years to come.
February 11, 2008
My favorite Levis book is still Elegy, but it was neat to see his artistic progression in this collection. There's some real nice surreal influences working in his early poems.
March 3, 2009
My favorite poet of all time! He takes me to imaginary places like no other writer whether they write fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.
October 6, 2011
Unbelievable. I love his cadence. The long and relevant teasing of sentences punctuated with little anchors draw us in at every interval so I don't want to let go.
April 26, 2021
I had read “Winter Stars” a few months ago, and it was a joy to revisit the poems from that book — so many wonderful ones that I look forward to returning to again. The poems from “The Widening Spell of the Leaves” were also outstanding. I wasn’t as partial to his earliest work, nor the final poems from elegy (which became a touch too dark for me), but as with any collection, it was interesting to see the transformations that Levis’ writing underwent as he matured into his themes and topics.
June 8, 2023
"You have no brother.
You never had a brother.
In the matinees no one sat next to you.
This brother for whom
you have been repairing linnets all your life,
unthankful stuffed little corpses,
hoping they'd perch behind glass in museums
that have been leveled, this brother
who slept under the fig tree
turning its dark glove inside out at noon, is no one;
the strong back you rode while
the quail sang perfect triangles, was no one's."
You never had a brother.
In the matinees no one sat next to you.
This brother for whom
you have been repairing linnets all your life,
unthankful stuffed little corpses,
hoping they'd perch behind glass in museums
that have been leveled, this brother
who slept under the fig tree
turning its dark glove inside out at noon, is no one;
the strong back you rode while
the quail sang perfect triangles, was no one's."
October 31, 2022
A professor recommended this book of Levis' work. I wasn't able to connect with the poetry in this book much so I didn't love it.
April 30, 2023
Stunning, heavy, rich, brilliant
July 17, 2023
Linnets
August 12, 2024
One of the great modern American poets. Took me too long to find him.
November 14, 2017
"One woman, who made an omelet with a sheet of tin/And five, light blue quail eggs/Had a voice full of dusk, and jail cells,"
Last month I was looking for some inspiration for my own poetry and I came across this book at my library. I'm very glad I had a chance to read it.
My favorite thing about Levis' poetry is how vivid it is. As you can see in the quote above his words are all chosen with great care, and they all work well together to paint a striking mental image.
"And though I don't know much about madness/I know it lives in the thin body like a harp/Behind the rib cage."
I found myself sucked in to each poem and I couldn't put the book down till I finished it. I gave this collection 4 stars on Goodreads.
Last month I was looking for some inspiration for my own poetry and I came across this book at my library. I'm very glad I had a chance to read it.
My favorite thing about Levis' poetry is how vivid it is. As you can see in the quote above his words are all chosen with great care, and they all work well together to paint a striking mental image.
"And though I don't know much about madness/I know it lives in the thin body like a harp/Behind the rib cage."
I found myself sucked in to each poem and I couldn't put the book down till I finished it. I gave this collection 4 stars on Goodreads.
March 3, 2021
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As a detail oriented person, I often ignored selected collections. Just like I don’t listen to albums whole, or use one tab but instead scroll endlessly through a sequence of blurbs, my concentration ruined...it's a personal failing that I assume is common in millennials. I appreciated reading the Selected of a poet I liked a lot as a younger person, as it allowed me to see the big picture of his ouevre.
There are lots of refrains here, common themes I see Levis come back to again and again:
1. The death of the father
2. Human reliance on legacy and story, and the emptiness/significance of a name
3. Women who abandon or have been abandoned
4. Infidelity in its many shades of morality
5. Paired violence and sexuality
There's also a Lynchian focus on disparate imagery and the darkness crawling under the surface of life. Unfortunately this is occasionally tinged with exploitation of images of the other, and use of the archetype of the disabled tragic figure.
Though I find some of his choices distasteful, his prose still captivates. The images I fell in love with still burn strong. Still, a background feeling of slight unease while reading made me realize that I feel a little disappointed in Levis, as an adult woman. I can see more fully how limited his perspective is as an unfaithful husband, or as a white boy picking grapes amongst immigrants at his parents' farm.
It's not untrue, just limited. It puts a damper on a poem I loved the most as a high schooler, My Story In a Late Style of Fire. The poems are still beautiful, but my appreciation is a little different. It has an edge on it. I wish so much that we had gotten a chance to read Levis as he aged, instead of losing him at 49.
As a detail oriented person, I often ignored selected collections. Just like I don’t listen to albums whole, or use one tab but instead scroll endlessly through a sequence of blurbs, my concentration ruined...it's a personal failing that I assume is common in millennials. I appreciated reading the Selected of a poet I liked a lot as a younger person, as it allowed me to see the big picture of his ouevre.
There are lots of refrains here, common themes I see Levis come back to again and again:
1. The death of the father
2. Human reliance on legacy and story, and the emptiness/significance of a name
3. Women who abandon or have been abandoned
4. Infidelity in its many shades of morality
5. Paired violence and sexuality
There's also a Lynchian focus on disparate imagery and the darkness crawling under the surface of life. Unfortunately this is occasionally tinged with exploitation of images of the other, and use of the archetype of the disabled tragic figure.
Though I find some of his choices distasteful, his prose still captivates. The images I fell in love with still burn strong. Still, a background feeling of slight unease while reading made me realize that I feel a little disappointed in Levis, as an adult woman. I can see more fully how limited his perspective is as an unfaithful husband, or as a white boy picking grapes amongst immigrants at his parents' farm.
It's not untrue, just limited. It puts a damper on a poem I loved the most as a high schooler, My Story In a Late Style of Fire. The poems are still beautiful, but my appreciation is a little different. It has an edge on it. I wish so much that we had gotten a chance to read Levis as he aged, instead of losing him at 49.
February 11, 2017
"Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night, And stare through the wet branches of an oak In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars again.
A thin haze of them, shining And persisting.
It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them.
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again."
-Winter Stars by Larry Levis
I haven't the wisdom to review Levis' work.
When I attempt to share/describe his prose with others, I sound sappy, corny, like a love-sick girl.
I'd never want to diminish the magnitude of Levis' clear, articulate, well lived-in poetry with sentimentality from my own Levis inspired life.
He had remarkable depth.
I miss him.
A thin haze of them, shining And persisting.
It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them.
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again."
-Winter Stars by Larry Levis
I haven't the wisdom to review Levis' work.
When I attempt to share/describe his prose with others, I sound sappy, corny, like a love-sick girl.
I'd never want to diminish the magnitude of Levis' clear, articulate, well lived-in poetry with sentimentality from my own Levis inspired life.
He had remarkable depth.
I miss him.
February 4, 2016
A collection like this is perhaps too much for a casual poetry reader. David St. John's afterword helped me appreciate and understand it more, but I think it's better for scholars or people who have lots of time to devote to a selection of a poet's entire body of work. Still, Levis' power and grace and intellect are evident, and I'm not sorry to have invested some time with him. Mostly I'm frustrated that I don't have the chance to take an actual course on contemporary poetry.
May 28, 2010
while reading this book, i made a note in the margin: "this guy writes like nobody ever lost a father before." and i didn't mean that in a good way. it's a big book & it felt repetitive - but did get a little more interesting toward the end. which is a shame since i was *so* ready to be done with it by that time.
December 30, 2014
I got lost in this book of poetry in a beautiful way. I read 7/8 of the book in one afternoon enveloped in the Steinbeck-like "stories" for lack of a better word. Once the spell was broken, it took a couple of days to finish the book of poems. I never could recapture that afternoon. I can't even remember what many of the poems were about, just that they took me somewhere else. Really cool.
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