Levy's poems, over 200 of which appear in this book, were written over a span of fifty-five years. They range from early love through a period of drugs and psychedelics and the dark humor of his 50s into an unlikely tranquility in old age. Combining precision of observation and language with an ironic worldview, Levy explores the nature of desire and the pull of death. His subject matter includes the Spanish Civil War, acequias and ravens, cacti and sirens, Goya and a historian of zero, Empedocles and ants, and as a backdrop to all, the open sea and its associations. Mythological and historical figures are represented by Daedalus, Bob Dylan, Proust, John Larson the explorer of North Carolina, the minotaur, Machado, Padre Martinez of New Mexico, Susanna and the Elders - all make their appearance in narrations, monologues and lyrics. Many of the poems are for and about his family as he explores the feelings and meaning of being a husband, father and son. Five poems are about his mother, who died at the age of sixty-six. Also included are a selection of Levy's translations and adaptations from Rimbaud's A Season In Hell, The Gilgamesh epic, as well as poems from the Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, French and Italian. Intimate, impersonal, confessional, formal, heart-felt, ironic, these paradoxical meditations and narrations range from the lyrical to the operatic, the elegiac to the mystical, the satirical to the erotic.
About the Author: Jim Levy was born in Chicago in 1940 and raised in Los Angeles, where his father practiced as a Freudian psychoanalyst. As a boy, he spent five summers in Taos, NM, which had a lasting impact on his life. He boarded for four years at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, earned nine varsity letters in track, basketball and soccer, then spent two years at Pomona College playing basketball. Influenced by the Beats, he rode freight trains up and down California and hitch hiked in Mexico and the Southwest. After a year in Europe, Levy enrolled at U.C. Berkeley and earned his B.A. in English and History and a certificate in secondary teaching. While at Berkeley, he met Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, a married woman with two children. They started living together in 1964 and married in 1966. When the marriage ended in 1971, Deirdre changed her name to Pema Chödrön and became a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Transcripts of her teachings, such as When Things Fall Apart and The Wisdom of No Escape, have reached a wide audience. In 1972 Levy began living in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico with Phaedra Greenwood, a writer with a son Alexander. They had a daughter Sara in 1974 and were married in 1977.In 1978 he became executive director of the Harwood Foundation of the University of New Mexico. This became what was to be a thirty-five year career working as executive director for nonprofit organizations. He and Phaedra were divorced in 1994. For several years, Levy lived an unsettled life, living in Patzauro, Montreal, Spain, and California. He and Phaedra were reunited in 2003 in the house in Arroyo Hondo, where they continue to write books. Phaedra has published Beside The Rio Hondo and North with the Spring, and edited and co-authored Drinking from the Stream. Throughout his life, Levy has written poetry, essays, stories, novels and memoirs. In 1971 and again in 1985, he destroyed four novels and almost everything else he had written, for not being a high enough quality. At the age of 74, he began publishing his books. He published Corazón (and Merkle), a book about his two dogs, and Cooler Than October Sunlight, selected poems. In 2015, he is publishing The Poems of Caius Herennius Felix, a first century Roman Spanish poet that he imagined, and Joy To Come, selected essays. In 2016 he will publish his memoirs and a short book of aphorisms and other meditations.