I should hasten to add that Levis was a worldly and urbane poet as well. In his five previous books of poems, he had charted a course that itself reads somewhat like a precis of poetic endeavor in America since the mid-60's. Elegy,'' published last fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press, often reveals the harsh nature of poetry as our age has insisted on it. The echoes of lost voices resound everywhere in these poems as they gather into fables and narratives of the century's collapse. They are figures and voices worthy of Villon and Dante.
Death is just another indignation to endure, the supreme banality.
The poems of ''Elegy'' are gracefully conversational. Levis trusts in the pleasures of language, the pleasures of thought. His sentences unravel slowly, twisting and rippling, gathering in force and definition. Elegy'' reflects his desire for a conversation with the world at large, and many of Levis's recent poems turn to the natural world as an imperfect but necessary mirror. Sometimes nature's most ancient face finds itself at odds with our daily experience.