Elegy

Zusatztext

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,<i>Elegy</i>.The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book,<i>The Widening Spell of the Leaves</i>, 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."<i>Elegy</i>, 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."

Autorenportrait

<b>Larry Levis</b> was born in Fresno, California, in 1946. His first book of poems,<i>Wrecking Crew</i>, won the United States Award from the International Poetry Forum, and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1972. His second book,<i>The Afterlife</i>, won the Lamont Award from the American Academy of Poets in 1976. In 1981,<i>The Dollmaker's Ghost</i> was a winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. Among his other awards were three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Larry Levis died in 1996.

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