Winter Stars (Pitt Poetry Series) Paperback – Import, 31 March 1985

WINTER STARS, and so Larry Levis, is obsessed with memory -- a claim I'm confident making given that the first line of the first poem, “The Poet at Seventeen,” is this: “My youth?” (3). This question drives the collection, just as Levis drives through his youth (probably on a tractor), past his present, and dwindles, dawdles, dragging his feet toward death, his own or his father's -- or perhaps even both.Levis' line is simple without being simplistic, with few words within the lines and a general narrative weaving through the poems as whole entities -- reminding me, in the best way, of country music. Rooted in the real and the rural, the poetry really packs a punch with the sudden materialization of strangeness or abstraction: “So memory sires / Oblivion …” (20); “The last thing my father did for me / Was map a way: he died, & so / Made death possible” (35). These two abstractions are, content-wise, what Levis appears to be most interested in, presenting them as a matter of fact, no two ways about it.The rurally realistic (often slipping and sidling into the urban) settings and details of WINTER STARS make it hard to argue with Levis' frankness. His poetry is so rooted in the personal experience that it becomes a sort of universal understanding; we experience the world as he once did and as he hopes to understand it in the present. “Why youth,” then? Well, to understand youth -- to understand childhood, to understand children -- is to maybe come to terms with the end of things, that “Oblivion sired” by the memory of who we were and who we will no longer be. Why youth? Because, Levis says, death.

Prompt delivery, book in exactly the condition described, and a very forthright message that they would attend to any issue should there be one...and, well, there wasn't any issue.

Like many readers, my favorite Levis poem is My Story in a Late Style of Fire. This is the book in which it was originally published, along with other favorites.I wish I'd purchased the paperback as well as the Kindle version. It's nice to have my favorites always with me on Kindle, but a book seems better for sitting with Levis' work and really savoring it. I recommend this volume, no matter which form you purchase.

A strong contender for the best book I've ever read - poetry or otherwise. It's hard for me to do this one justice in a paragraph; all I can say is that Winter Stars doesn't contain a single bad poem, and its most memorable lines get stuck in my head like a pop song. A really, really, heartbreaking pop song. The collection contains ruminations on Levis' youth (he grew up on a vineyard in California,) laments for the death of his father, and some of the best love/breakup poems I've ever read. Since the first time I read this book, I've turned to it more times than I can count. On sad days? Sure. But also on those days you wouldn't trade for anything - the days when inspiration and energy seem to pulse through your body, and you've never been surer of the people and things you love - Winter Stars has been by my side on those days, too.

Levis’ genius on full display.