The Residual Years:

Collected Poems of William Everson, 1934-1948

The first volume of William Everson’s collected poetry gathers his early work, poems exploring the violence inherent in the natural world and in the heart of man.

The collected poetry of William Everson was published by Black Sparrow in three volumes. Currently, only volumes one and two are available.

Volume one, The Residual Years: Poems 1934-1948, includes a selection of uncollected and previously unpublished poems.

Volume two, The Veritable Years: Poems 1949-1966, includes all the poetry, including previously unpublished pieces, written by Everson during his eighteen years as a Dominican lay brother, Brother Antoninus.

Volume three, The Integral Years: Poems 1966-1994, gathers work from his later years and the poet’s reconciliation with nature and his own place in it.
But all of Everson’s poetry, wrote Kenneth Rexroth, is a unity: “It is all concerned with the drama of his own self, rising and falling along the sine curve of life, everything full of a terrible beauty and pain. Life isn’t like that to some people, and to them these poems will seem too strong a wine. But of course life is like that.”

Godine, Publisher | Black Sparrow Press is distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand. For more info, click here.

William Everson spent much of the second World War in a camp for conscientious objectors in Oregon, where he founded a fine-arts program and completed his first volume of poetry. He enjoyed national fame after the publication of this volume, but he chose to separate himself from the world at a Dominican monastery under the name “Brother Antonius.” He lived at the monastery from 1951 to 1969. Everson spent most of the following decades near Santa Cruz, where he was poet-in-residence at UC Santa Cruz and founded Lime Kiln, a small press for poetry.

Allan Campo is an editor whose careful, detailed work with poet William Everson’s papers at the Bancroft Library made his collections possible.

Bill Hotchkiss was a novelist, poet, and editor of the Beat Generation. He was born in Connecticut but relocated as a young man to the Southwest, which serves as the setting for his best-known works.