"The voyage through a single poem by Larry Levis, let alone through this expansive volume, will change you, change what you know a poem to be, and 'poem,' for Levis, is indistinguishable from life. His metaphors, however transcendental, are anchored to lived experience in the actual world, and he arrives at his talismanic images through the confluence of memory and the senses, as they swirl within the rural, the pastoral, and the working classes. Levis's mastery intensifies from book to book like a thundercloud whose purples deepen and expand until it fills with lightning. The earliest poems are like folk songs, spare as cleaned bone, with a discernible twang, and from there, the work gathers girth and volition, building through shades of music into something with the prodigiousness of opera. What follows opera? Hallucination; the visionary itself. As I read Levis, I forget there is any other kind of poetry, any other poetry at all. There is just Levis, with his wives and lovers, both actual and archetypal, his grand absorption in the self within 'the wide swirl & vortex of history,' his addictions, fed by a dealer named John Donne, his death wish, and his charm. But still he finds a way to give us the magnificent elegies, the final controlled gush of all that he was willing to say to us and ask us to grieve. 'There is no moral to my story,' he writes, and I believe him. 'From the outset, I gleamed, like a sea.' Levis, in reading you, I stand in witness to your gleaming. I have no faith that your magic will impart itself to me by studying your moves. If you'd known, if I knew, the mystery would come crashing down like a chandelier."-Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry
