Larry Levis, _Elegy_

THIS IS THE FIRST of the two posthumous collections of Levis's poetry, edited by his teacher and friend, the late Philip Levine. It's very strong--the strongest of the three books by Levis I have read, I would say.

The collections with nine poems titled "Elegy...," e.g. "Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It" and "Elegy with an Angel at its Gate." There are two similarly titled poems in The Darkening Trapeze (the second posthumous collection), and in  the afterword to that book David St. John speculates that Levis had in mind making his own version of the Duino Elegies. That would be worth bringing out, if any enterprising publisher is interested. All eleven are ambitious, unnervingly dark, but powerful, and the cumulative impact if published as a stand-alone book would be large, I suspect.

The "Elegy" poems are mainly memory poems, naturally, conjuring up the vanished, or maybe they are not conjuring up the ghosts so much as they are haunted by them. There are some good memories, like the work Levis did alongside the farmworkers in his father's vineyard, but the poems are all in the key of loss, and some are staggering. 

What are we but what we offer up?

Gifts we give, for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.

Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber ball
In the photograph I have of him, head on the table & resting his cheek
Against the cool surface of the ball, the one that is finished spinning, the one

He won't give back.

The "him" in the photograph: Levis's son? Levis himself? Oblivion? The ball has completed its movement and is at rest, but is gone, irretrievably gone, as the child is too, another example of "time's relentless melt," as Sontag says all photographs are. Nothing remains of what we offer up save that we did, indeed, offer it up. 

Yet we still have these poems, and the poems are not nothing.