The Integral Years: Poems 1966-1994 (Collected Poems) - Softcover

Everson, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574231081 ISBN 13: 9781574231083

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press, 1999

Synopsis

William Everson (1912 1994) was many things a conscientious objector, a fine-press printer, a Dominican monk, and a much-loved teacher and literary personality. Above all else, he was a poet for many readers the celebrator of the spirit and landscape of the Pacific Northwest. His lifework in poetry is clearly divided into three chapters, a fact reflected in the three-volume arrangement of his Collected Poems. The first volume gathers his early work, poems exploring the violence inherent in the natural world and in the heart of man. The second collects the moving lyrics and narrative poems on Christian themes published under his Dominican name, Brother Antoninus. The final volume, comprising work written after his return to secular life, marks the poet's reconciliation with nature and his own place in it. But all of Everson's poetry, wrote Kenneth Rexroth, is a unity: "It is all concerned with the drama of his own self, rising and falling along the sine curve of life, everything [full] of a terrible beauty and pain. Life isn't like that to some people, and to them these poems will seem too strong a wine. But of course life is like that."

About this title

About the Author:

Shears holds a B.A. and M.A. from California State University, Sacramento, and the M.F.A. in creative writing, prose fiction, from the University of Oregon, where she was a teaching fellow for several years.

David Carpenter is Professor of Medieval History, King's College, University of London
Campo holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree from Loyola University.

Hotchkiss holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an M.A. from San Francisco State and an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. He teaches at Sierra College.

Review:

"William Everson vividly represented one of the great traditions of California poetry the prophetic visionary. His worldview was more religious, his temperament more mystical, and his voice more private than his spiritual and artistic model, Robinson Jeffers, and yet the two poets are recognizably kin.... Both wrote out of the elemental confrontation of man and untamed nature, both [had] poetic visions that emerged from an almost primal existential struggle. [And both] are irreplaceable, the genuine article." --Dana Gioia

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1574231081
• ISBN 13: 9781574231083
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 359
• Editor: Shears Judith