Now Available From Graywolf Press
Book Title: Everything Preserved
Author: Landis Everson
Editor: Ben Mazer
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Genre: Poetry
DSM Description: Everything Preserved collects the poems of Landis Everson, which span 40 years and range in topic from spirituality, love and loss, to anger, nostalgia and gratitude. Everson’s poetry career began in Berkeley, CA, in the late 1940’s, alongside such luminaries as Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. After winning praise from his peers, Everson suddenly stopped writing. Then, after meeting the editor Ben Mazer, who was researching the Berkeley Renaissance for Fulcrum Magazine, Everson once again put pen to paper. The result is this book, which was the debut winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation.
Reviews: “Often Everson will pluck from the air a theme or two, entangle them like ribbons round a maypole within the first three or four lines of his poem, and then introduce a third, contra-contrapuntal theme in the second stanza, watching as these elements take on what almost seems like a life of their own in rondo. His is an elegant interchange of control and release, in which mistake, misunderstanding, the aleatory and the interrupted are each given a place at the table.” — by Kevin Killian.
Excerpt:
HOW TO REMAIN DRY WHEN IT RAINS
by Landis Everson
Closed in my arms there have been flowers
or a stranger on a twilight bed
guns and white packages and the long
odd sadness of my lover’s face.
Most curious of all have been the poems
holding me wide as they left my house
allowing in shouts from the strange streets
of trouble or joy or the death of secrecy.
I carry a map case full of scenarios
because like sand it can give me traction
when words from another intention ask to come in
and the dictionary yells out they are liars.
Landis Everson in 2004
From Everything Preserved Editor Ben Mazer’s Interview with DSM: I had been researching the Berkeley Renaissance, a loose term for all the poets who were writing in Berkeley in the late 1940s, for a feature in Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. Then I ran into Dick Stone, who had known some of those poets, and offered to show me his collection of manuscripts, letters and photographs, which included a large sheaf of poems and letters by Landis. This was in about November of 2003, and I was already aware of Landis’ poetry from old issues of the Berkeley Occident which I had been looking at. I got in touch with Landis, we fell in thickly with each other, and very soon he began experimenting with writing poems again. Read more from the DSM Interview.
Everything Preserved is available for purchase now.
1) Purchase from Graywolf Press
2) Purchase from Amazon
3) Purchase from Powell’s Books
About Graywolf Press: In 1974, Graywolf’s founder Scott Walker embarked on a publishing adventure. Originally working out of a space provided by Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Washington, Graywolf soon moved in to a shop of its own, or rather into Scott’s backyard in a small outbuilding affectionately called the “print shack.”
It was in this small, cramped building that the first books were produced for the reading public. Each book was painstakingly hand-set and hand-printed on treadle-operated machines. After six months of fourteen-hour days, the first full-length poetry book, Instructions to the Double by Tess Gallagher, was given life. The small print run of fifteen hundred copies sold out in four months. Read more from Graywolf Press.
