Elegy

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had 'an all-but-completed manuscript' of poems. Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as 'the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes'; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The