Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems

by Larry Levis

Overview

All the blazingly original work by Larry Levis, “one of the greatest poets of a generation” (Carolyn Forché)

The poetry of Larry Levis increasingly occupies a legendary place of reverence among poets and readers—the spell of his reputation only continuing to widen in the thirty years since his death. From the briefer lyrics and deep image-making of his early books to the long sequences and operatic narratives of his last works, Levis’s poems have an unmistakable signature, a way of expressing the sweep of history, perception, and heartbreak. Over his career, his poetic lines broadened to accommodate the cinematic aperture of his observations on American empire, poverty, landscape, migrant workers, political violence, addiction, and art. Levis’s expansive poems came to resemble the interconnecting patterns just discernible in the eddies of a stream or the leaves circling in a wind.

Swirl & Vortex at last makes all of Levis’s poetry available in one definitive volume. This collection includes the five books published in Levis’s lifetime, a brilliant reconfiguration of Levis’s posthumous books, and unpublished late poems, edited and with an afterword by David St. John. To trace Levis’s poetic development into his extraordinary “late style of fire”—cut short by his early death—is one of the singular experiences in contemporary poetry. Swirl & Vortex is an essential collection by one of the great poets of the end of the twentieth century, and a transformative work spiraling out toward our future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644453728
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	02/03/2026
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	504

About the Author

Larry Levis (1946–1996) was the award-winning author of five poetry collections during his lifetime, including Winter Stars and The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and the celebrated posthumous collections Elegy and The Darkening Trapeze.

Editorial Reviews

“An undisputed poetic master, Larry Levis inspires an almost cultlike obsession in those introduced to his poems. . . . Despite his lyrical genius and mythic poems influenced by art, film, and music, Levis still risks saying things plainly without any false promise of transcendence (which is, after all, why we trust him). . . . It’s precisely that dark honesty that makes his work so riveting, marking the posthumous return of a literary hero who is only heroic because he’s come back to tell us the awful truth: nothing will keep us alive and nothing will make it better.”—Ada Limón, Publishers Weekly

“What Larry Levis has meant to me feels endless. He has never stopped teaching me—not since that first lucky encounter, before I knew what a poem could really be. Once I finally heard him—like with Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison—his voice never left my ear. The Levis style is more than a form of elegy; it’s a landscape where the sublime is grounded in syntax and experience—in politics, love, and vulnerability. His incomparable poems map place and space: Shiloh, Coney Island, Oaxaca; man vs. ghost, man vs. nature, horse vs. motorcycle. He is as mercurial as the melancholy muses he celebrates: Caravaggio, Poe, Rimbaud, migrants, rebels, outcasts. Levis’s collected poems are capacious and spellbinding, and they grow larger with each reading. Swirl & Vortex is a cosmos, a bible.”—Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak

“The voyage through a single poem by Larry Levis, let alone through this expansive volume, will change you, change what you know a poem to be, and ‘poem,’ for Levis, is indistinguishable from life. His metaphors, however transcendental, are anchored to lived experience in the actual world, and he arrives at his talismanic images through the confluence of memory and the senses, as they swirl within the rural, the pastoral, and the working classes. Levis’s mastery intensifies from book to book like a thundercloud whose purples deepen and expand until it fills with lightning. The earliest poems are like folk songs, spare as cleaned bone, with a discernible twang, and from there, the work gathers girth and volition, building through shades of music into something with the prodigiousness of opera. What follows opera? Hallucination; the visionary itself. As I read Levis, I forget there is any other kind of poetry, any other poetry at all. There is just Levis, with his wives and lovers, both actual and archetypal, his grand absorption in the self within ‘the wide swirl & vortex of history,’ his addictions, fed by a dealer named John Donne, his death wish, and his charm. But still he finds a way to give us the magnificent elegies, the final controlled gush of all that he was willing to say to us and ask us to grieve. ‘There is no moral to my story,’ he writes, and I believe him. ‘From the outset, I gleamed, like a sea.’ Levis, in reading you, I stand in witness to your gleaming. I have no faith that your magic will impart itself to me by studying your moves. If you’d known, if I knew, the mystery would come crashing down like a chandelier.”—Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry

“‘When I go toward you,’ Rilke wrote in The Book of Hours, ‘it is with my whole life.’ He was, of course, vowing to God, but could just as easily have been promising Poetry, so thorough was his devotion. Larry Levis, by all accounts, was cut from Rilke’s cloth. One of the few true apostles of the practice, he laid on its altar everything he had and was. Gave it all to poetry so that his poetry, in its turn, might give: to readers, to writers, to all his fellow zealots. Here, at long last, is his entire oeuvre—early, late, and posthumously collected poems—in one gorgeous and thoughtfully curated volume. The apostle’s gospels, chapter and verse. Swirl & Vortex. For all of us longtime acolytes, I’m overjoyed; of the soon to be initiated, those reading Levis for the first time, I’m jealous.”—John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

From the Publisher