Dark God of Eros

In the course of his long life, William Everson was a farmer, a conscientious objector, an agnostic, a pantheist, a Dominican friar, a fine printer, and always a poet. As Brother Antoninus, he was part of San Francisco's Beat movement during the 1950s. From a cabin above the central California coast during the 1970s, the buckskin-fringed and white-bearded Everson inspired still another generation. Everson did not merely write poetry; it was for him the medium of an ecstatic, intensely sensual, and at times desperate search for spiritual fulfillment. Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader offers, for the first time, a volume of selections from the entire body of Everson's work. Albert Gelpi, an acclaimed literary critic and a personal friend of the poet, has compiled an authoritative selection of poetry, autobiography, interviews, letters, and criticism, devoting an entire chapter to Everson's commentary on the work of his mentor Robinson Jeffers, and another to comments by Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Kenneth Rexroth on Everson's work. Illustrated with photographs of Everson and reproductions of his fine art printing, Dark God of Eros opens a window into the life and career of this brilliant and fascinating personality for whom, as Kenneth Rexroth said, "Everything is larger than life with a terrible beauty and pain." Book jacket.