PAINFUL BUT BEAUTIFUL. "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" aligns unnervingly with two of the poems that appeared in The Darkening Trapeze, "Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil" and "Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire," but the figuration of self-destruction as arson is if anything more direct and confessional in this earlier poem. I got the feeling that some headlong but doomed affair had once and for all finished off Levis's marriage, that he knew it was futile and wrong but wasn't about to stop himself, and ended up burning down his own life. I'm just guessing, of course.
That poem and the two final ones in the book would be part of any argument that Levis's work is worth reading and heeding, I think. "The Assimilation of the Gypsies" and "Sensationalism" both start from photographs by Josef Koudelka, with Levis opening the photos up into stories or screenplays that turn out to be about our relationship to time, which is mainly our relationship with death, and so we might connect these to an earlier poem in the book, "Those Graves in Rome," one of which is the grave of one whose name was writ in water...and it's all painful. But beautiful. I'm going to go see if I can recall the last stanza of "Ode on Melancholy" now. I had it memorized once. I bet Levis did too.
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