Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia, 1943-1966
Pocket Poets No. 20
Philip Lamantia author Garrett Caples editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:City Lights Books
Publishing:20th Mar '25
£11.99
This title is due to be published on 20th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The original American surrealist returns in a new edition of the 1967 classic.
"I am eager to do a book of yours," Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote to Philip Lamantia in Nerja, Spain in 1966. "What about SELECTED POEMS OF PHILIP LAMANTIA?" The missive came at the right time, as Lamantia had recently reembraced the surrealism of his youth and sought to publish his current work alongside his key poems of the 1940s, when the then-15-year-old poet was published by war-exiled leader of the Surrealist Movement, André Breton. For Breton, the young poet was a new Rimbaud, but Lamantia also became known as a poet of the Beat Generation, participating in the 1955 Six Gallery Reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl." A pioneer of San Francisco's psychedelic culture, Lamantia reemerged through City Lights at the crest of the Summer of Love.
Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia reflects each facet of the poet's development up to the point of its publication. "Revelations of a Surreal Youth (1943–1945)" includes the incendiary poems from his teenage years which brought him early avant-garde fame, including his signature "Touch of the Marvelous." "Trance Ports (1948–1961)" covers the Beat years, evincing increasing involvement with mysticism, esoterism, and religion. Finally, "Secret Freedom (1963–1966)" heralds his return to surrealism, cementing his countercultural bona fides with the LSD-fueled "Blue Grace," the zig-zagging Kundalini-inspired "What Is Not Strange?" and the Aquarian Age ode "Astro-Mancy," which prefigures his later engagement with Native American culture.
This new edition includes an afterword by poet and editor Garrett Caples, recounting the book's genesis through correspondence between Lamantia and Ferlinghetti and including archival images. A much-needed restoration to the Pocket Poets Series of today, Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia glows like a red-hot coal still burning with the revolutionary fervor of its time.
"When Lamantia's Selected Poems was first published in the mid sixties, it captured the revolutionary spirit of the times and went on to become an unlikely bestseller. Like free jazz, Lamantia's poetry shows that visionary art can serve as the expression of social upheaval and the desire for progressive change—for what is heard in such work is the pure cry of the crisis. Thus the reissue of this classic Selected at our latest moment of crisis could not be more timely. As is true of the greatest poetry, Lamantia's work has maintained its relevance across historical epochs, offering many pathways to the garden of Utopia."—Andrew Joron, author of O0
"These poems having been ignited prior to our personal contact, they empower devastating riddles, compound projections, exploded amphorae, never as stillborn imaginative particles, never self-imbibed by lingual stasis, but as astronomical trace units alive as living realm '. . . to go beyond its own existence.' They are magnetic flares, potent sigils, magically arising from untold crevasses."—Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane)
Praise for Philip Lamantia:
“A voice that rises once in a hundred years.”—André Breton, cofounder of Surrealism
“An American original, soothsayer even as Poe, genius in the language of Whitman, native companion and teacher to myself.”—Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl and Other Poems
“You will probably be our greatest living poet since Whitman.”—Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer
“Philip Lamantia’s poems are about rapture as a condition. They are spiritual and erotic at the same time. Bright and dark, the enclosed polarities of devotion. St. Teresa and Rimbaud.”—Tom Clark, author of Truth Game
“The blade-flash of Lamantia’s word lode strikes the owl stone, arcs to inspire. A quotidian American surrealism? Sudden array of Lemmy Cautions dashing through a hundred identical hotel doors. Visions for sure. Quick! Akhmatova in Lemuria!”—Clark Coolidge, author The Crystal Text
“A man in command of a wild imagination . . . with a particular place in the ranks of the most important moderns.”—Library Journal
ISBN: 9780872869349
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
120 pages