Collected Poems

Lamantia’s life would make a spectacular novel: welcomed into the Surrealist movement as a Bay Area teen in the 1940s, Lamantia moved to New York City, moved back, joined Allen Ginsberg for the seminal Gallery Six reading, advocated marijuana, “coca,” and opiates, which he kicked later with help from Timothy Leary and LSD; lived and traveled in Mexico, and later visited Egypt, in search of indigenous sacred wisdom; suffered serious bipolar disorder; investigated, and incorporated into his poetry, Native American belief; and tried to combine all these sources with an intermittently passionate Catholic faith. The poetry itself, from Lamantia’s first published volume, Erotic Poems (1946), through Destroyed Works (1962) and the resurgent Meadowlark West (1986) to the fragments left at his death, reflects Lamantia’s enthusiastic quests for extremes, for “world destruction in a pluriverse”: “It’s absurd I can’t bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire… Come up from dead things, anus of the sun!” “The crank of my bones beats the angel boxer from nowhere in the chipglass face.” Readers already fascinated by Surrealism, the Beats, the literature of narcotics and hallucinogens, or by American mysticism and idiosyncratic religion, will certainly want to know what Lamantia did; others may find the achievements unequal to the inspirations. (Sept.)