Everything Preserved
by Landis Everson edited by Ben Mazer
From Publishers Weekly
Everson, who makes his book-length debut in his 70's as winner of the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson first book award, swapped poems with a young Jack Spicer and John Ashbery, then stopped writing for 43 years until a recent creative outburst. This volume-divided into two sections, one for nine poems written between 1955 and 1960, and the other comprising the remaining 66, written since 2003-quickly establishes the charms of the playful early work, as in a poem that describes "at least twenty deer" driven by famine to graze on the speaker's pillow and other "poor, unfamiliar pastures." There is a plainspoken, aphoristic strangeness at the heart of many of these early poems-set to subtle music. "The perfect form of woman is a ghost," Everson writes in his last and most ambitious early piece, "The Little Ghost I Played With." The recent work is much more uneven-though much of it has been published in major literary magazines-and there are still plenty of pleasures to be found. Everson evokes the ordinary with a continually surprising touch: percussive language evokes longing for a deceased lover ("I'll take your long legs and / the afterthought of thunderstorms / or sex all day rolled up"); a lemon tree in Eden "hides the smell / of new babies"; and a space probe begets thoughts on onions and innocence. "I am / written on thoroughly, a lost novel / found again," Everson writes, as if starting an autobiography, then turns unexpectedly: "I remember the predictable plot too late, / realize the silly sad urgency of moss."
Folks this read is only for serious poetry lovers, there are many advanced elements in this one.
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