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Overview
William Everson (1912-1994) was many things-a conscientious objector, a fine-press printer, a Dominican monk, and a much-loved teacher and literary personality. Above all else, he was a poet-for many readers the celebrator of the spirit and landscape of the Pacific Northwest. His lifework in poetry is clearly divided into three chapters, a fact reflected in the three-volume arrangement of his Collected Poems. The first volume gathers his early work, poems exploring the violence inherent in the natural world and in the heart of man. The second collects the moving lyrics and narrative poems on Christian themes published under his Dominican name, Brother Antoninus. The final volume, comprising work written after his return to secular life, marks 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.""William Everson vividly represented one of the great traditions of California poetry-the prophetic visionary. His worldview was more religious, his temperament more mystical, and his voice more private than his spiritual and artistic model, Robinson Jeffers, and yet the two poets are recognizably kin.... Both wrote out of the elemental confrontation of man and untamed nature, both [had] poetic visions that emerged from an almost primal existential struggle. [And both] are irreplaceable, the genuine article." -Dana Gioia