Elegy (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Larry Levis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Larry Levis was an outstanding poet, and a student and colleague of Philip Levine. Levine, who edited this posthumous manuscript, writes that Levis's "early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives for as long as poetry matters." That's high praise, and the poems in Elegy are sturdy enough to carry the weight of those expectations. Especially striking is "The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.," an encounter between urbanites trapped within the prisons of their routines, and an ancient-seeming possum crossing a busy city street: "It would lift its black lips & show them / The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors, / Teeth that went all the way back beyond / The flames of Troy & Carthage..." Levis's writing is marked by memorable imagery that resonates both to the world of our daily lives and our mythic longings for transcendence.

Review

"Elegy . . . often reveals the harsh nature of poetry as our age has insisted on it. These new poems carry Levis's speculative impulse far into the mind's shadows. . . . The poems of Elegy are gracefully conversational. Levis trusts in the pleasures of language, the pleasures of thought. His sentences unravel slowly, twisting and rippling, gathering in force and definition. His poems have always been filled with a rugged grandeur, the inspired gestural sprawl of a Whitman-gone-west. Elegy reflects his desire for a conversation with the world at large, and many of Levis's recent poems turn to the natural world as an imperfect but necessary mirror. . . . Remarkably Levis manages to wear his wisdom like a shrug, not like a prophet's mantle. . . . He believes in the simple dignity of human beings, and what we discover in these poems is Levis's hope in a desperate tenderness that might rescue us from our notions of oblivion. . . .Elegy stands as the culmination of Larry Levis's poetic achievement. . . . One can only hope that . . . Levis's remarkable poems will continue to live far into our literature.”
--New York Times Book Review

“His work is monumental, spiritual, and some of the most enduring in contemporary poetry. These final poems are long, elegiac, and tragically alive. They show how his work was moving toward a great dance of the self finally coming to terms with the world.”
--Bloomsbury Review

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (October 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822956489
• ISBN-13: 978-0822956488
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There is an afterlife, but it is this one., January 19, 1999

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Elegy (Pitt Poetry) (Hardcover)

If we, the reader, are skeptics and believers of the possibility of art, if we imagine that there is another space language occupies outside of that small room that is our lives, if we are willing to accept ironies and unwillingly acknowledge the tragedy that has always been the recurring theme of the individual, then this book is the past, the present, and future of our desire to live. It's hard to comprehend that there can be anything so miserable as a wish to live forever or anything so beautiful as two old horses named Anastasia and Sandman, but Larry Levis is one of the greatest poets in the American language and culture because of his ability to texture language and improvise narratives so fluid that the reader understand and arrives at that place where all words and all stories begin and end. That place being the middle or the ever-present present that exists when a word is spoken or read and the mind attempts to find the object, the meaning, or the example for what that word represents. Or that ever-present that becomes the present as the story teller remakes the story so that it is again something real and intangible and we experience it because it is there and we do not experience it because it is not there. I don't know how else to explain the book and each poem that invites the reader to examine mortality without the immediate allusion to death but the difficult exercise of life and the ironies it weaves around us. It is impossible to read this book and not feel completely desperate, lost, and in want of every moment of passion we've ever owned and lost to circumstance, fear, the idea of being embarressed in front of our peers. Even the depraved moments we've had in our lives seem worthwhile in the language, story, and voice of this book that is so much of heart of its author that it remains a ghost behind its words. And if you've ever wanted to be bridge your life as an adult to your lost childhood, if you've ever wanted to be invisible, or drive as fast as your car could go, or found yourself talking to a horse, a tree, an empty page that replies without sympathy, without comfort, and even mocks you in its silent and indifferent manners, then this book might remind you of how it felt to have so many desires with nothing but your hands to carry them with.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The poet's final collection and his most powerful., April 21, 1998

By 

Eliot Kahlil Wilson ([e-mail]) (Tuscaloosa, AL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Elegy (Pitt Poetry) (Hardcover)

When Larry Levis, author of The Wrecking Crew and The Widening Spell of Leaves, died unexpectedly in May of 1996, he left behind Elegy, a collecion of twenty poems. Readers will recognize the style of Levis. His poems are labyrinthine and digressive in a way that many readers might find off-putting, but his associative peregrinations do little to detract from the overall power of his work. Readers will find the same themes they have come to expect from Levis: death, ecstasy, and human indifference. Reading Levis' work is like witnessing a car accident--a particularly bad one--your own.