The Later Poems of Larry Levis, Collected in The Darkening Trapeze

At LARB, Kathleen Graber looks at The Darkening Trapeze, a posthumous collection of Larry Levis's later work, published by Graywolf this year. "By the time I first discovered Levis’s poems, he was already gone," writes Graber. "Yet his body of work has become one of the central texts of my life." More:

The assertions made by the poems in The Darkening Trapeze, like the rhetorical strategies that reach toward them, are often slippery and contradictory. The poems’ insistent pursuit of a state of chronic wakefulness melds the spiritual devotion of the ascetic with the insatiability of the addict. No poem in this collection intrigues me more than “A Singing in the Rocks,” a meditation on the seemingly ever-retreating nature of the sacred. Its narrative recounts its speaker having heard — after pulling over, after having driven all night — “Dobro & steel guitar & the pinched, nasal twang of a country tenor / A singing in the rocks though no one was there.” The “he” in this poems suggests either God or His stand-in:

He rejoices in pleasures too pure for this world.
He is the sore screech of the wheel in the addict’s voice,
And disbelief itself under the summer stars.
And the tenor voice of the sax & the snow swirling on the city streets
To frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable.

As this passage also demonstrates, readers familiar with Levis’s earlier work will find at the core of this collection the system of images he spent his creative life exploring: fire, snow, trees, wind, darkness, stars. Such elemental power so often in collision with the bleakly urban, the natural world still insisting upon itself inside the diminished vistas of the made. The most vital presences in these poems are often ghostly and incorporeal (as the singing is), something felt or heard but untouchable, just as language, the “unsayable” and the muted “sayable,” is shadowed by the the that remains unavailable and beyond it. In “If He Came & Diminished Me & Mapped My Way,” the speaker, lost, alone, nevertheless feels himself accompanied by “someone so thin I could have passed my hand through him.” He concludes “Idle Companion” by asking:

Unshakable companion,
The one friend left within
When all the others go,
And the only one I know
To be criminally sane,
Soul, what is your name?

Yet sometimes the shades in these poems are more historical than psychical or divine, for Levis is also a poet who often seeks to place personal suffering and circumstance within the broader contexts of our shared public past, as he also does in earlier poems, including his incomparable long sequence “The Perfection of Solitude,” which appeared in The Widening Spell of the Leaves (1991).

Read it all at Los Angeles Review of Books.