The poetry of Larry Levis increasingly occupies a legendary place of reverence among poets and readers—the spell of his reputation only continuing to widen in the thirty years since his death. From the briefer lyrics and deep image-making of his early books to the long sequences and operatic narratives of his last works, Levis’s poems have an unmistakable signature, a way of expressing the sweep of history, perception, and heartbreak. Over his career, his poetic lines broadened to accommodate the cinematic aperture of his observations on American empire, poverty, landscape, migrant workers, political violence, addiction, and art. Levis’s expansive poems came to resemble the interconnecting patterns just discernible in the eddies of a stream or the leaves circling in a wind.
Swirl & Vortex at last makes all of Levis’s poetry available in one definitive volume. This collection includes the five books published in Levis’s lifetime, a brilliant reconfiguration of Levis’s posthumous books, and unpublished late poems, edited and with an afterword by David St. John. To trace Levis’s poetic development into his extraordinary “late style of fire”—cut short by his early death—is one of the singular experiences in contemporary poetry. Swirl & Vortex is an essential collection by one of the great poets of the end of the twentieth century, and a transformative work spiraling out toward our future.
