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Dark God of Eros:
A William Everson Reader

Edited with an Introduction by Albert Gelpi

448 pages, 6 x 9, with b&w photos and color plates
Trade paper, ISBN: 1-890771-64-3, $22.95

A California Legacy book

William Everson (1912–1994), aka Brother Antoninus, was a poet, monk, letterpress printer, and a quintessential Californian. Originally from the San Joaquin Valley, Everson was part of the Beat poet movement in San Francisco during the 1950s; among his peers were Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov.

Everson wrote about nature, religion, spiritual exploration, eroticism, sex, and poetry. He gained great notoriety for his public poetry readings, where he projected great presence and veracity. Charismatic, Everson was a great inspiration to others, especially to those who appreciated the integration of poetry and printing. During the course of his life, his beliefs took many forms: he was an agnostic, a pantheist, a conscientious objector, an anarchist-pacifist Catholic Worker, a Dominican friar, and a moral force of the coastal mountains north of Santa Cruz, California.

Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader collects Everson’s most significant poems from the mid-1930s through the 1990s—including poems from The Residual Years, The Veritable Years, and The Integral Years. Also included are autobiographical writings, a section on Everson and Robinson Jeffers, his essays on poetry and poetics, portfolio items from his handpress, interviews, letters, and photographs. This carefully chosen selection highlighting the range of Everson’s work will help readers better understand the life and many transformations of one of California’s most fascinating and elusive bards.

Reviews:

"From his early poems of the San Joaquin through his work as a pacifist/anarchist printer-poet in the war years, the God-haunted poems of Brother Antoninus, the meditative books on Jeffers, the late poems—as fierce as ever, about love, landscape, aging—the body of William Everson’s work is the record of a continuously passionate encounter with poetry."—Robert Hass, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1995-1997

Editor Biography:

Albert Gelpi (Ph.D., Harvard) is a professor emeritus at Stanford University, where he has taught American literature since 1968. He has published extensively on American poets, from Edward Taylor and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich. Gelpi met William Everson (then Brother Antoninus) in 1962, and their friendship deepened over the years. At Everson’s request, Gelpi wrote the afterword to the 1968 volume of The Veritable Years and edited a book of selected poems titled The Blood of the Poet, published just months before Everson’s death in 1994.