This magisterial work of scholarly reconstruction restores the entirety of William Everson's early poetry in a single volume, including not only the full contents of the 1948 New Directions edition of The Residual Years -- first section of Everson's "life trilogy", The Crooked Lines of God -- but subsequent textual variants and later author revisions, as well as an extensive compilation of uncollected and unpublished poems from 1934-1948, all of which combine to allow us a fascinating first look at this poet's beginnings and the development of his art.
Emerging here in a sudden annunciation of gifts, in poems of the mid-1930s Everson's individual voice can be perceived evolving from that of his master, Robinson Jeffers. Along with Jeffers the greatest of our poets of Western landscape, Everson from the first incorporates psyche into that stark landscape in a way very much his own -- while also purposefully echoing a bardic tradition projected from his Nordic roots
The year dies fiercely: out of the north the beating storms, And wind.
At the roof's edge, lightning swording the low sky: This year dying.
Like some traitored Norse stumbling under the deep wounds
The furious steel smashing and swinging.
From the northern room I watch in the dusk
And being unsocial regard the coming year coldly
Suspicious of strangers, distrustful of innovations
Reluctant to chance one way or another the unknown.
I leave this year as a man leaves wine
Remembering the summer, bountiful, the good fall the months.
I sit in the northern room, in the dusk, the death of a year
And watch it go down in thunder.
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