Larry LevisWinter Stars (Pitt Poetry Series)

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.

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.

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.

Mr. Levis has an incredible gift for articulating many of the struggles and abstractions of life in concrete images and beautifully written lines, and the result is often deeply moving.

I was really shocked to find out what a talented author Levis was. He's really a HUGE talent, even if you really don't care for poetry.

Larry Levis has done something old and new: he has brought back the concept of epic poetry as a cohesive narrative whole. Each poem is able to be read as its own, individual piece, and yet, when placed together with the collection acts a chapter to a personal life story. One walks away from winter starts with a more realized understanding of poetry and the poets behind it, thanks to thematic motifs that fall throughout like snowflakes and from the singular narrative voice. One of the most prevailing motifs throughout Larry Levis's poetry collection, Winter Stars, is the theme of time - in particular youth, age, and how the two intersect. For example, his first poem, The Poet at Seventeen, speaks in a narrative tongue, describing scenes more so than playing with more formal elements, such as sounds. In addition, his first section, aptly titled Winter Stars, explores age in a variety of ways - through looking at the poet as a young person, looking at the past (in particular youth) with the gaze of the unavoidable. The narrator seems to suggest that everything that happened was destined to happen and to try and change fate adds up to nothing. Winter Stars deals with old age, in particular with stars as signifiers of memory - the most interesting part about the title Winter Stars, which appears three times - as name of the book, name of a sub section of the book and the name of a poem within that subsection, is the concept of Night and Winter as simultaneously the beginning and ending of things: Dawn breaks from night, and starts a new year in January, bringing the spring and the youth of new life with it. However, winter and night also end the season with the end of December and the first light of stars commencing the end of the day. Often, he seems to use the three stages of man in his poems: the child (his son), the father (himself), and the omnipresent man, (his own father).The work of this poet, the way it is set in this book, is hard not to take as a consistent narrative, with a consistent narrator. Indeed, many of his poems reflect not only personal seeming stories, but some, such as Family Romance, give the authors name as the speaker's name directly. The rest of the poems are written in similar styles with a speaker who's voice feels consistent. This work almost reflects that of an epic poem - one that is not broken up linearly but as small vignettes that formulate a picture of a life, his life, as opposed to a series of independent poems. I suppose if I had a complaint, it would only be that the cover could have been so much more interesting to reflect the work inside.

Beautifully written poetry, graphic and compelling. Each poem is a miniature novel filled with imagery, insight and emotion. Will be reading this forever.