Bed of Sphinxes: Selected Poems [Paperback]

Philip Lamantia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Bed of Sphinxes offers a selection of poems from Philip Lamantia’s books and from recent work, representing five decades of impressive poetic achievement, from his early years of association with Surrealists-in-exile through the Beat Generation era to the present. The poems range from visionary apocalypse to a lyrical fusion with nature.

By turns nightmarish, erotic, hermetic, they create an astonishing world charged by Lamantia’s energy and imagination.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Allen Ginsberg wrote that Philip Lamantia was one of his poetic teachers, an American soothsayer on the level of Edgar Allen Poe, and I don't know how much more encouragement you'd need to check out this stunning collection. "The Owl" ("the dark steps I climb are lit up / by his Eye magnetic to the moon") is brilliant and evocative, and fairly typical of the level of writing to be found here. Visionary, lyrical, and hypnotic.

Review

A teenager at the time, Philip Lamantia was the only American poet Andre Breton invited to join the Surrealists. Influenced by Surrealism's reconciliation of opposites ("The mermaids have come to the desert"), his poems were unlike anything else being written in America during the 1940s. One can't imagine Auden, Moore, or Lowell writing, "As the women who live within each other's bodies / descend from their polar regions / to the circle of demons." By the late 1950s, Lamantia had transformed Surrealism and made it American by taking up the Beats' interest in American speech. Neither pastiche nor claims of sincerity have ever appealed to him. His recent poems are ecstatic, erotic, and yet disembodied, orphic; they connect the visible to the invisible, the cacophonous present to mythic presences: "Gemmed, caught up in the old ways, silver flesh / gleams between mandibles of the African Kingfisher / These moving realities appear on the Nile / as if a postcard view of it held up a hieratic bird." More than fifty years after he first published, Lamantia's sensual, resistant poems remain unlike anyone else's.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

America In The Age Of Gold
The Analog
The Ancients Have Returned Among Us
Animal Snared In His Revery
As Some Light Fell
Astro-mancy
Automatic World
Awakened From Sleep
Ball
Becoming Visible
Bed Of Sphinxes
Beyond This Trail Of Crystal Rfails
Blue Grace
Blue Locus
A Civil World
Coat Of Arms
Dead Smoke
Deamin
The Diabolic Condition
Diana Green
Egypt
The Enormous Window
Ephemeris
Ex Cathedra
Fantast
Fin Del Mundo
Flaming Teeth
From The Front
Hermetic Bird
High
Horse Angel
Hypodermic Light
I Am Coming
Iguana Iguana
In A Grove
In Yerba Buena
Infernal Landscape
Infernal Muses
Inside The Journey
Interior Suck Of The Night
Isn't Poetry The Dream Of Weapons?
It's Summer's Moment In Autumn's Hour
Jeanlu
Luminous
Man Is In Pain
Mirror And Heart
Morning Light Song
Native Medicine
Observatory
Oraibi
Out Of My Hat Of Shoals
The Owl
Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind Of Yoga
Phi
Plumage Of Recognition
Poem For Andre Breton
Primavera
Resurrections
The Romantic Movement
Rompi
Shasta
She Speaks The Morning's Filigree
Sheri
Still Poems
Subconscious Mexico City New York
The Talisman
Terror Conduction
There
There Are Many Pathways To The Garden
Time Traveler's Potlatch
To Begin Then Not Now
Touch Of The Marvelous
Ultima Thule
Unachieved
Voice Of Earth Mediums
What Is Not Strange?
What Made Tarot Cards And Fleurs-de-lis
The Wheel
Wilderness Sacred Wilderness
A Winter Day
Words I Dream
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

In 1955, the San Francisco Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia was one of the "Six Poets at the Six Gallery" whose voices joined that of Allen Ginsberg's at his first public reading of Howl. That event catalyzed unstoppable change in the rhythms, vocabulary, and socio-political concerns of American poetry. Lamantia's latest volume offers a view of his bardic evolution over a perspective of 50 years. His undiminished energy and fast-stepping surreal brashness are now spinning apocalyptic images into whirlpools and clouds of lyric beauty. There is no longer need to use shocking juxtaposition for its own sake. The visions of peyote and "Hypodermic Light" have been explored. Lamantia's style takes form by his language: "I shall say these things that curl beyond reach/ A fatal balloon/ Resolving riddles/ It's pure abyss-crackling vortex." If the poem were a painting on canvas, it would strike onward over and through frame, wall, ceiling and sky. Like a masterly solo jazz riff, "The Romantic Movement" hardly stops for breath. His surrealistic flow of associations seeks for bottomless depths and limitless heights. Creatures of wing and feather continue to signify as symbols. The 1940's "Hermetic Bird" is reprised in the title of his present concluding poem, "Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga." Opening "Thirty feisty finches at the window," the poem dances from twig to branch of associations -Horus, Bird and Mozart. "So few of us, if the seed be/ become scythe, its own end/ as wheaten being/ germinates a songbird's form/ We too were once avian/ bridge - window - to another life. Lamantia is ever trying to net ALL of it into life, thought, and poem - and transcend, besides. An ambition not achievable, but it is by this doing - writing, reciting -that we achieve the grace of living. -- From Independent Publisher

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Product Details

• Paperback: 141 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872863204
• ISBN-13: 978-0872863200
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,922,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927-March 7, 2005) was a United States poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems -- ecstatic, terror-filled, erotic -- explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life. The poet was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and raised in that city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in the magazine View in 1943, when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City. He returned to the Bay Area in 1945. The poet spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the 1950s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washo Indians of Nevada. In later life, he embraced Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and wrote many poems on Catholic themes.and his first book was published a year later.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Bed of Sphinxes" -- Check It Out!, February 20, 1999

By 

Steven Fama (San Francisco, California, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bed of Sphinxes: Selected Poems (Paperback)

Philip Lamantia is to traditional poetry as Pegasus is to the plow-horse. The poems in "Bed of Sphinxes" spring from the meeting of the conscious and pre-conscious mind, and then take wing, carrying the reader on a marvelous ride of imagination and adventure. "Bed of Sphinxes" presents poems from Lamantia's more than fifty years of work. The collection begins with poems written in the early 1940s, when as a young teenager Lamantia traveled from his native Frisco to New York and met and was published by Andre Breton and the other exiled surrealists. Next are poems written in the '50s and '60s, when Lamantia explored religious mysticism, the derangement of the senses, and various hermetic disciplines. These are followed by poems from the '70s and '80s, when Lamantia returned to a pure surrealist approach, and added an ecological imperative that grounds the poems in the western states and Northern California in particular. Finally, the book includes poems from recent years, which show that Lamantia retains the force of vision and word-smithing skills so common to his work. Lamantia's poetry may seem difficult to those who have only experienced poems of prosaic narration, rational thought, and conventional imagery. His poems do not so much describe events, persons, or feelings, as they are products of such experiences. Lamantia does not, for example, tell us about an ecstatic experience, but rather gives a poem that was born from it. Combine this approach with his wide-open exploration of language and the imagination -- which seems to take words and alchemically transmute them into charged images -- and it is not hard to see why Lamantia's poetry is far different than that typically encountered. The opening lines of "Touch of the Marvelous," the first poem in "Bed of Sphinxes," suggest Lamantia's startling power: "The mermaids have come to the desert / they have set up a boudoir next to the camel / who lies at their feet of roses // A wall of alabaster is drawn over our heads / by four rainbow men / whose naked figures give off a light / that slowly wriggles upon the sands // I am touched by the marvelous / as the mermaids' nimble fingers go through my hair...." While Lamantia's automatistic poetry blossoms without regard to any consciously imposed 'agenda,' his values are apparent. Lamantia's poetry seeks revolution: a world where desire, love, the wild, birds, and the ancient reign; a world where, as Lautreamont said, "poetry is made by all." But there is also an apocalyptic, nightmarish edge to some of the poems; Lamantia is not a poet whose work can be easily categorized. His range is astonishing . For me, Lamantia's poems bridge the horizon and zenith. His words bring together the depths of caves and the summits of mountains. I strongly suggest that you lie down in "Bed of Sphinxes." In Lamantia's jeweled dreams of poems, you will find not only riddles of inspired and marvelous beauty and erudition, but perhaps a few answers too. [This review is a revised version of one first posted on this page in early 1998. That previous review recently disappeared into the cyber-void.]

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bed of Sphinxes: Watch Out!, January 9, 1998

By 

Steven Fama (San Francisco, California, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bed of Sphinxes: Selected Poems (Paperback)

Philip Lamantia may befuddle or annoy, especially if you prefer poetry of prosaic narration, rational thought, and conventional imagery. For Lamantia is to traditional poetry as Pegasus is to the plow-horse. His poems in "Bed of Sphinxes" spring from the surreal meeting of the conscious and unconscious and then take wing, carrying the reader on a marvelous ride of imagination and adventure.

This collection, which spans his fifty year career which began in 1943 when as a teenager he traveled from his native Frisco to New York and met and was published by Andre Breton and other exiled surrealists, shows well Lamantia's wide-open exploration of the imagination, where he alchemically transmutes words into charged images. The opening lines of "Touch of the Marvelous," the first poem of the book, suggest his often startling power : "The mermaids have come to the desert / they have set up a boudoir next to the camel / who lies at their feet of roses...."

The words most often found in Lamantia's poetry -- "stars," "marvelous," and "luminous" are among the most common -- signal some of the primary concerns of his imagination. His poetry seeks revolution: a world where desire, love, the wild, and the ancients reign and where, as Lautremont said, "poetry is made by all."

So, when you're tired of the stale poetry so common in this too often corrupt and bankrupt world, and when you're ready to bridge the horizon and zenith, the cave and the mountain-top, lie down in "Bed Of Sphinxes." In Lamantia's jeweled dreams of poems, you just might find the answers to a few of the riddles of our troubled existence.