The Veritable Years: Poems 1949-

The Veritable Years, second volume in William Everson's life's-work trilogy, follows on from the early "pre-Catholic" works of The Residual Years, Poems 1934-1948 published earlier this year by Black Sparrow. This comprehensive scholarly edition gathers all the verse, including previously unpublished pieces, written by Everson during his eighteen years as a Dominican lay brother, Brother Antoninus. Taken together, 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 strict asceticism of The Crooked Lines of God (1949) eventually yields to the ecstatic eroticism of River-Root (1957); in the aftermath of that watershed work, the poems increasingly reveal reservations and misgivings in the poet-monk's commitment to his religious role. (Three years after writing the 1966 Rose of Solitude, he would return to secular life.)William Everson has been justly called "the most important religious poet of the second half of the century". He is also, as evidenced here, along with Jeffers the greatest of our poets of West Coast nature: