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The Afterlife: Poems
The second book of Levis's poems that was awarded the 1976 Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets.
- GenresPoetry
61 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
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77 people want to read
About the author
Larry Levis
33 books59 followersLarry Patrick Levis was born in Fresno, California, on September 30, 1946. His father was a grape grower, and in his youth Levis drove a tractor, pruned vines, and picked grapes in Selma, California. He earned a bachelor's degree from Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) in 1968, a master's degree from Syracuse University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1974.
Among his honors were a YM-YWHA Discovery Award, three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Levis died of a heart attack in 1996, at the age of 49.
Among his honors were a YM-YWHA Discovery Award, three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Levis died of a heart attack in 1996, at the age of 49.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 19, 2011
As poet, Larry Levis excels at whittling away at everyday things until they reveal something strange and exciting, like in these lines from "A Poem of Horses":
You go further into the blank paper.
You go past the white smirk of the benign.
You find the dark trousers of your father,
The hairpins of your mother.
This sifting action of discovery is explored thematically throughout, forming a lyrical arc in the book that is ultimately celebrated as an aspect of mourning. "This is a good page./ It is blank,/ and getting blanker."
I love the uncanny bursts/ruptures of this discovery process like when he writes in "Signs":
All night I dreamed of my home,
of the roads that are so long
and straight they die in the middle-
among the spines of elderly weeds
on either side, among dead cats,
the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase
thrown open, sprouting failures.
In lines like this, it almost seems as though Levis is sanding down the whiteness of the page until the black ridges of the letters and words surface.
You go further into the blank paper.
You go past the white smirk of the benign.
You find the dark trousers of your father,
The hairpins of your mother.
This sifting action of discovery is explored thematically throughout, forming a lyrical arc in the book that is ultimately celebrated as an aspect of mourning. "This is a good page./ It is blank,/ and getting blanker."
I love the uncanny bursts/ruptures of this discovery process like when he writes in "Signs":
All night I dreamed of my home,
of the roads that are so long
and straight they die in the middle-
among the spines of elderly weeds
on either side, among dead cats,
the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase
thrown open, sprouting failures.
In lines like this, it almost seems as though Levis is sanding down the whiteness of the page until the black ridges of the letters and words surface.
August 19, 2024
ENOUGH STRAY MENTIONS of Larry Levis were swimming into my ken (e.g., by Mathias Svalina) that I was starting to think, hmm, I really should read some Larry Levis, and after reading this collection (the second of the five volumes he published in his lifetime, 1946-1996) I am contemplating a deep dive.
Levis tends to be both precise and mysterious, which appeals to me:
Applying to Heavy Equipment School
I marched farther into the Great Plains
And refused to come out.
I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest.
Around me in the fields, the hogs grunted
And lay on their sides.
His figurative language continually surprises ("At night I lie still, like Bolivia," or those "scaffolds of disinterest"), as does his imagery ("And so I think of the darkness inside the horn, / How no one's breath has been able / To push it out yet [...]").
What appealed to me most is that this is a poetry of desolation that somehow consoles. Seems impossible, but there it is--in this respect a bit like the poetry of Mr. Svalina himself. "Signs" is a poem I expect to return to. Two of its four stanzas:
And this evening in the garden
I find the winter
inside a snail shell, rigid and
cool, a little stubborn temple,
its one visitor gone.
[...]
I stay up late listening.
My feet tap the floor,
they begin a tiny dance
which will outlive me.
They turn away from this poem.
It is almost Spring.
Levis tends to be both precise and mysterious, which appeals to me:
Applying to Heavy Equipment School
I marched farther into the Great Plains
And refused to come out.
I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest.
Around me in the fields, the hogs grunted
And lay on their sides.
His figurative language continually surprises ("At night I lie still, like Bolivia," or those "scaffolds of disinterest"), as does his imagery ("And so I think of the darkness inside the horn, / How no one's breath has been able / To push it out yet [...]").
What appealed to me most is that this is a poetry of desolation that somehow consoles. Seems impossible, but there it is--in this respect a bit like the poetry of Mr. Svalina himself. "Signs" is a poem I expect to return to. Two of its four stanzas:
And this evening in the garden
I find the winter
inside a snail shell, rigid and
cool, a little stubborn temple,
its one visitor gone.
[...]
I stay up late listening.
My feet tap the floor,
they begin a tiny dance
which will outlive me.
They turn away from this poem.
It is almost Spring.
May 23, 2020
Okay, this is a shoe-in because it was the first book of poems that opened my mind to what poetry could be, and not how it was taught throughout middle, high school, even English 101 in college. If you're not familiar with the strong tradition of non-rhyming American poetry published after WW II, this one may hook you. This book, and THE BRANCH WILL NOT BREAK by James Wright, set me on a course to finish my creative writing degree in poetry. The Iowa Writer's Workshop, in particular, has nurtured some greats.
I'm too tired to detail at length what these gems mean to me, and what possibilities they hold for poetry, but long-story-short--Levis had a genius vision. It's almost disheartening, in a way, because much of his fire comes from originality of thought, not of technical mastery. You can learn to write good poetry, but do you have an interesting mind, a searing soul?
A note on the drab cover--I've come to love it like you would your baby-boomer father who still wears Hawaiian shirts. But in honesty, it's rather embarrassing that the publishers would choose so drab a cover. This book could reach a wider audience with a great photo or illustration. It goes to show how sequestered poetry has become. Was it due to budget constraints? I doubt it. Is it that poets and those that publish them have an art-for-art's-sake mentality? The cover is hilariously bad.
I'm too tired to detail at length what these gems mean to me, and what possibilities they hold for poetry, but long-story-short--Levis had a genius vision. It's almost disheartening, in a way, because much of his fire comes from originality of thought, not of technical mastery. You can learn to write good poetry, but do you have an interesting mind, a searing soul?
A note on the drab cover--I've come to love it like you would your baby-boomer father who still wears Hawaiian shirts. But in honesty, it's rather embarrassing that the publishers would choose so drab a cover. This book could reach a wider audience with a great photo or illustration. It goes to show how sequestered poetry has become. Was it due to budget constraints? I doubt it. Is it that poets and those that publish them have an art-for-art's-sake mentality? The cover is hilariously bad.
July 27, 2020
After rereading Elegy and reading, for the first time, The Darkening Trapeze, it was striking to go back to The Afterlife (Levis’ second book) and realize how consistent Levis’ poetic obsessions/vision/ambitions were. The cycle of creation/destruction, life/death, however you want to phrase that, are here in Afterlife just as they are at the end of his career. Fire images, for instance, from the beginning to the end of his writing life. In Afterlife, the life-cycle focus gets tied more directly to a farming life. From “In Captivity”: “We’ll turn slowly, flowers / In the mouths of drowned cattle. / In a dawn of burned fields, / The sun disappoints you . . .” The whole final “Linnets” sequence seems to ask: How are we connected to the creatures we kill? Honestly, I was surprised to find so much death in this slim volume. I mean, he’s 31 when this is published, and yet he’s imagining a world without him in “The Morning After My Death.” Which is an amazing poem in several different ways, but also incredibly sad in retrospect. Levis’ driven, romantic fatalism leaves a sour taste sometimes, despite the consistently striking way in which that spirit is expressed on the page. But the other side of that attitude is this incredible yearning to see connections — another consistency from book to book. Everything is connected to everything (life to death and everything in between and even beyond us), and there’s a kind of salvation in that. Salvation is not the right word. Love, maybe, is better. Love as looking and seeing connections and realizing a kind of oneness. And the fact that one of Levis’ favorite devices starts both the final “Linnets” poem in The Afterlife and also begins the very last poem in Trapeze, “God Is Always Seventeen,” makes his whole career seem all the more like one unified project. From “Linnets—: “This is a good page. / It is blank, / And getting blanker.” From “God Is Always Seventeen”: “This is the last poem in the book.”
July 21, 2017
I loved The Afterlife, more than I first thought I would. I started it and was disappointed by the lack of long operatic poems and surreal mysticism to the extent of The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, but my hope for the book ended up being more than fulfilled. I didn't adore this collection to the same overwhelming degree as his much later collection, but I was still drawn in and drawn along by Levis's work.
The poems in this collection were personal (although not necessarily confessional) and move between the simple and the magic effortlessly, like in "Delwyn Creed":
My favorite poem in the whole collection was section 3, "The Rain's Witness: Linnets 1-12" which is a personal and sweeping poem with moments like "In Illinois on bridge is made entirely / of dead linnets. When the river sings under them, / their ruffled feathers turn large and black," and
The poems in this collection were personal (although not necessarily confessional) and move between the simple and the magic effortlessly, like in "Delwyn Creed":
He is swallowing beeror "Waking":
in the frozen vineyard
he uproots and burns--
clearing land for tract homes.
2. His Son
Eyes gleaming like something stolen,
he sneers at me and at the slick river
carrying shoe leather on its back.
On methedrine he doodles
halos, snakes, stars.
He dreams of making a coat,
of hunting alone above timberline
until he spits blood, and goes on
thanking no one, goes past
the ice inventing itself.
You could hear someone arguing
about money, a man and his wife.
You could hear them closing the little jails
No one would enter or sweep.
My favorite poem in the whole collection was section 3, "The Rain's Witness: Linnets 1-12" which is a personal and sweeping poem with moments like "In Illinois on bridge is made entirely / of dead linnets. When the river sings under them, / their ruffled feathers turn large and black," and
Your brother grows into a stranger.I also especially liked "The Witness", "Inventing the Toucan," "The Map," "Waking," "Readings in French," and "A Poem of Horses", but there was no poem in the book that I disliked.
He walks into town in the rain.
Two gold feathers behind his ear.
He is too indifferent to wave.
He buys all the rain ahead of him,
and sells all the silence behind him.
August 16, 2025
At the end
she laughed at get well cards,
at each of her dresses,
at her new shoes
filling with silence,
until there was nothing
to laugh at—and
the oak and the elm
filled with the night
a child might draw.
I stare past you at
the little white knobs
on a dresser which
will outlast us.
You loved falling;
You loved the braille
Of starfish and the snows,
High and fatherless.
You loved fire,
And the hail that had no memory.
You loved to forget.
You think of snow,
The blank page that forgets us,
The strangers we grow into.
Sometimes we burn so cleanly
There is nothing left.
We'll go on, as always, harvesting walnuts
On our hands and knees,
And die voicelessly
As a sedan full of cigar smoke
Sinking under a bridge.
We'll turn slowly, flowers
In the mouths of drowned cattle.
In a dawn of burned fields,
The sun disappoints you,
And the blight you begin to remember
Is me.
she laughed at get well cards,
at each of her dresses,
at her new shoes
filling with silence,
until there was nothing
to laugh at—and
the oak and the elm
filled with the night
a child might draw.
I stare past you at
the little white knobs
on a dresser which
will outlast us.
You loved falling;
You loved the braille
Of starfish and the snows,
High and fatherless.
You loved fire,
And the hail that had no memory.
You loved to forget.
You think of snow,
The blank page that forgets us,
The strangers we grow into.
Sometimes we burn so cleanly
There is nothing left.
We'll go on, as always, harvesting walnuts
On our hands and knees,
And die voicelessly
As a sedan full of cigar smoke
Sinking under a bridge.
We'll turn slowly, flowers
In the mouths of drowned cattle.
In a dawn of burned fields,
The sun disappoints you,
And the blight you begin to remember
Is me.
September 24, 2021
(emoji con gli occhi che piangono)
May 21, 2022
god I love larry levis so much
July 16, 2022
so beautiful. levis manages to conjure thousands of perspectives, to embody any being, to see past, present, and future.
June 28, 2023
eat papi!
April 23, 2025
Linnets linnets linnets
May 23, 2025
Beautiful, an oil painting made of words
January 31, 2026
short and beautiful. an examination of loneliness and despondency that lingers in your chest after you finish it. cold, clear, sharp imagery
April 26, 2021
It's not happy...but it is haunting. A newcomer to Levis, I'd only read one poem before this collection, and I was blown away. Here are images so breathtaking and a cadence so irresistible that again and again I had a kind of joyful realisation that this is what poetry can be, this is how it differs from ordinary speech. But this joy slammed up against the utter bleakness of the vision - in the ol' "To be or not to be" debate The Afterlife firmly comes down on the side of, testifies to, and yearns for the "not to be." Absolutely no resort is made to any idea of the comforting power of love, no affirmations are made about this life or the next.
But I know I will come back to these poems. I will come back for images that floored me as I read. In Rhododendrons Levis wants,
In No.10 of the Linnet sequence At the High Meadow,
I will come back for a musicality of line and consistency of tone that is so persuasive it means the poems force you to feel what they feel even if you've never seen a coyote or a freeway in Fresno. I will come back but like getting in Charon's boat to cross the River Styx it's not a ride I'll particularly enjoy (and this is the only reason I've knocked off a star, for my experience, rather than his skill) - in this collection Levis' poems paint a world of emptiness, of a desire for immateriality, of amnesia involuntary and voluntary, random violence, creeping menace, nihilism and uncertainty. This is especially true of the sequence Linnets where Levis' brother is destroyed by what he believes to be an act of mastery. I found numbers 6 and 10 almost unbearable to read.
Sometimes I wonder how poets get up and go about their day after writing this kind of work. I guess for Levis writing was a cathartic exorcism that got this stuff out of his head, at least for a while. But be warned, in reading it he will very skilfully put it in yours!
But I know I will come back to these poems. I will come back for images that floored me as I read. In Rhododendrons Levis wants,
to resemble them, and remember nothing,
the way a photograph of an excavation
cannot remember the sun
In No.10 of the Linnet sequence At the High Meadow,
in the morning
a glass of water goes blind
from staring upward.
I will come back for a musicality of line and consistency of tone that is so persuasive it means the poems force you to feel what they feel even if you've never seen a coyote or a freeway in Fresno. I will come back but like getting in Charon's boat to cross the River Styx it's not a ride I'll particularly enjoy (and this is the only reason I've knocked off a star, for my experience, rather than his skill) - in this collection Levis' poems paint a world of emptiness, of a desire for immateriality, of amnesia involuntary and voluntary, random violence, creeping menace, nihilism and uncertainty. This is especially true of the sequence Linnets where Levis' brother is destroyed by what he believes to be an act of mastery. I found numbers 6 and 10 almost unbearable to read.
Sometimes I wonder how poets get up and go about their day after writing this kind of work. I guess for Levis writing was a cathartic exorcism that got this stuff out of his head, at least for a while. But be warned, in reading it he will very skilfully put it in yours!
October 26, 2014
WOW!!!
December 13, 2015
"But I am still afraid to move,
afraid to speak,
as if I lived in a house
wallpapered with the cries of birds
I cannot identify."
- from "Rhododendrons"
afraid to speak,
as if I lived in a house
wallpapered with the cries of birds
I cannot identify."
- from "Rhododendrons"
January 11, 2011
If you want to read a great collection of poetry, this is it.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews