Elegy, Paperback/Larry Levis

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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 collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden--the horses, the migrant workers--are worked toward death; a world in which ``Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing``; a world in which ``you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't.`` Elegy , as Levine says, was ``written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives.