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The Veritable Years: Poems 1949-1966

The Veritable Years: Poems 1949-1966

Volume 2 of The Collected Poems

by William Everson
Edited by Allan Campo, Bill Hotchkiss

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Product Details

Black Sparrow Press

Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-57423-082-6
Pages: 458
Size: 5.92" x 8.98"
Published: November 1998
Hardcover
ISBN: 1-57423-0832
Pages: 458
Size: 6.47" x 9.34"
Published: January 1997
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The second volume of William Everson’s collected poetry covers his work while a Dominican lay brother, written under the name, Brother Antoninus. These poems provide a passionate record of Everson/Antoninus's struggle to maintain strict vows of celibacy. That struggle is fraught with dramatic tension, as the poet strives to establish a fragile equilibrium between opposed psychic polarities of Spirit and Flesh.

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Volume one, The Residual Years: Poems 1934-1948, includes a selection of uncollected and previously unpublished poems.
Volume two, The Veritable Years: Poems 1949-1966, includes all the poetry, including previously unpublished pieces, written by Everson during his eighteen years as a Dominican lay brother, Brother Antoninus.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. 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.”
William Everson
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
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.