Larry Levis, _The Dollmaker's Ghost_

HIS THIRD BOOK, first published by Dutton in 1981. The edition I read is a "Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary" reprint, which appeared in 1992. My copy must be later than that, though, as the back cover copy refers to Levis's death in 1996. The book is still in print, which means it must still be finding readers twenty-eight years after Levis's passing--good to know.

The collection previous to this one, The Afterlife (1977), was the first of Levis's books I read, and the difference between that book and this one felt large. The Afterlife was by no means a light-hearted or sunny book, but it had streaks of whimsy and spots of hope in it. The Dollmaker's Ghost feels bleaker. A lot of it seems to inhabit rural spaces or those small, nearly deserted towns scattered on the highways between Iowa City and Fresno. It feels lonely.

From the reading around I have done since I read The Afterlife, I know that Levis wrote much of it in the happier years of his marriage to poet Marcia Southwick. But something seems to have already gone awry in Part One, which finds Levis back on his parents' grape-growing operation, haunted by memories of his growing up and wondering where he lost the plot. 

The book has a lot of retrospection in it. Levis's last, posthumously published work is mainly retrospection, I would say--all those elegies--but it's a little different here, more about being haunted by old photographs and drifting smoke as well as by actual ghosts, who show up often in Part Four (e.g., the dollmaker of the title). 

Here are some lines from one of the poems in Part Four, "Some Ashes Drifting Above Piedra, California":

And now,
if we listen for their laughter,
Which vanished fifteen years ago
Into the cleft wood of these boards,
Into the night and the rain, 
It will sound like cold jewels spilling together,
It will sound like snow...
We will never have any money, either,
And we will go on staring past the sink,
Past the curtain,
And into a field which is not even white anymore,
Not even an orchard,
But simply this mud,
And always,
Over that, a hard sky.

The "they" are the farm workers who used to live in the shack the speaker is describing. I'm not sure who the "we" could be, but I suspect the other person acknowledged in that "we" is not actually physically present in  the shack with the speaker, because he seems really, really alone.