Customer Reviews

Ring of Bone

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This book was my first introduction to Lew Welch and I came out of it feeling as if I knew him. It includes poems, songs and even a couple drawings by him and in its own dizzying way documents Welch's search for his totem animal. Early in his life he feels he is Leo, a lion, but eventually accepts that he is a turkey buzzard. Full of nuances and silliness, I have to read it four more times to unravel his (then) contemporary and ancient allusions.

One example of his simple brilliance:

(included in a section in which he sums up his education, subject by subject)

BOTANY

Consider the Passion Flower:

Who'd ever think a plant would go to/ so much trouble

just to get f--ked/ by a Bee.

Lew Welch experimented with Life in These United States before choosing the Life of Poetry. Ring of Bone, collected and lightly/deftly edited and introduced by Donald Allen shortly after Lew's disappearance, reveals a man with more open eyes/ears and wider empathy than fellow (and dearly beloved) sons-of-witches who never wavered. Or never obviously wavered. Or never wavered all the way out of this world without a trace. The difference in tone and impact between this book and a later selection edited by Gary Snyder is profound. Amazon treats both as same for review purposes, but this is not so. Currently on back order, which is a bit frightening, since much of the less elegantly crafted or only semi-finalized writing included in this collection but absent from Selected Poems feels essential to me. Not just what Lew himself may have imagined, in the end, he should have written and released, but a wide smattering of what he did write, the bulk of the whole thing. In a clamshell.

Buy and enjoy the whole thing (Ring of Bone) instead. Lew Welch may have been less certain about this and that, most of his life, than this selection or refinement suggests. When a writer disappears suddenly, the entire remaining mess is often interesting. Selections reveal much about their editors, of course.