The Integral Years: Poems 1966-1994

by William Everson, Judith Shears (Afterword)

This third and concluding volume in the grand "life trilogy" of Everson's complete poems -- following The Residual Poems 1934-1948 and The Veritable Poems 1949-1966, both reissued last year by Black Sparrow -- brings into focus for the first time the full sweep of one of the great accomplishments of American poetry. A poet of moral conscience, natural landscape and spiritual meditation, Everson produced work of astonishing intellectual energy, kinetic power and symbolic resonance in these writings of his later years -- his output from the last days of his life as a lay brother (Brother Antoninus) through his departure from religious orders, marriage, and resumption of a secular name and career. the sea lions are gone. In their place, Beyond the white line of the breakers, Drifts a gaggle of surfers, oblique on their boards, Facing seaward. From the shore One sees but the tilted torsos, Tense shoulders, the alert heads. They look to the far Wrinkling of the sea, surmisin Which influx of the swell, impending, Will coalesce into consequentiality, Engender thrust, and, reaching forward, Stoop towering in, all ultimate Augmentation? This, in their mind's eye, Is the vision of The great wave of their wonder.

Genres: Poetry

355 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1999

About the author

Also known as Brother Antoninus, William Everson was an American poet of the Beat Generation, San Francisco Renaissance and was also a literary critic and small press printer.
Everson registered as an anarchist and a pacifist with his draft board, in compliance with the 1940 draft bill. In 1943, he was sent to a Civilian Public Service (CPS) work camp for conscientious objectors in Oregon. In the camp at Waldport, Oregon, with other poets, artists and actors, he founded a fine-arts program, in which the CPS men staged plays and poetry-readings and learned the craft of fine printing. During his time as a conscientious objector, Everson completed The Residual Years, a volume of poems that launched him to national fame.
Everson joined the Catholic Church in 1948 and soon became involved with the Catholic Worker Movement in Oakland, California. He took the name "Brother Antoninus" when he joined the Dominican Order in 1951 in Oakland. A colorful literary and counterculture figure, he was subsequently nicknamed the "Beat Friar." He left the Dominicans in 1969 to embrace a growing sexual awakening, and married a woman many years his junior. The 1974 poem Man-Fate explores this transformation. Everson was stricken by Parkinson's Disease in 1972, and its effects on him became a powerful element in his public readings.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the first time I read an Everson poem back in the 1970s I've been hooked. And from the first time I read "Pluto, regnant occultist, lord of the lorns of lost space" in the third stanza of "Tendril in the Mesh," I've been coming back to these poems from the latter third of Everson's career. As Bill Hotchkiss writes in his "Afterword: The Kingfisher's Cry" in this volume, "William Everson IS poetry."