Customer Reviews

The Widening Spell Of Leaves (Pitt Poetry Series)

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Great book of poetry from the master of elegies. It's right up there with Winter Stars in my book.

What is the absolute? Perhaps that's an odd question to ask this book considering how startlingly personal and layered with personal reflections the poems are. Sometimes I read this book and want only to be the speaker, Larry Levis. I don't care how painful his life has been. I don't care how he obsesses over the most painful moments. The speaker, Larry Levis, experiences humanity with a depth I can only hope I'm capable of, a depth that is actually palpable while reading the poems.

Most people I know respond to that Levis voice. The inexplicable texture and volume of it. I would say there is also an intellectual argument here as well. Because when you have lived through and reflected on the types of life choices he describes, and you realize you can't just call them mistakes, and you can't undo any small part of them, you come to realize the absolute quality of a fact. It might change history, or history might remain unchanged, even oblivious to what happened. But the fact will always remain.

For me, the magic of Widening Spell is the powerful sentimentality enabling Levis to speak of and around this delicate relationship between fact and history. It could be the history of a bomb going off in Oaxaca. It could be the speaker leaving his wife and son. Something in that Levis voice wishes that it would never quit telling me about anything. In the chronology of Levis' books, Widening Spell accomplishes the ambition that was hinted at in Winter Stars. And it outshines Elegy at least in its capacity to probe and probe into the most troubled parts of the very troubled life Levis puts on display.