This reissue of City Lights’ 1967 “Pocket Poets” No. 20 spans the itinerant, reclusive Lamantia’s journey from surrealist prodigy to demiurgic force among the Beats, returning to the playful psychedelia of his native San Francisco on the eve of the Summer of Love. The ardent first section of this triptych teems with Lamantia’s striking juxtapositions of abstruse images that so impressed André Breton, mapped across atemporal dreamscapes reaching “beyond the soiled curtain of space” into realms of sublime rapture. More diverse in style and scope and darker in mood, the middle section introduces mythic and liturgical elements—“undeciphered glyphs, stones of the immortals”—woven into the dynamic incantations that helped inspire Ginsberg to howl. Lamantia’s return to a looser surrealism is more specifically countercultural, yet cosmic in its New Age longings, its ecstatic shrines freely strewn with symbols and talismans from many traditions. Poet and editor Caples’s new afterword includes text and facsimiles of surviving correspondence between Lamantia and City Lights cofounder Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
VERDICT Lamantia helped spark a revolution in American letters, only to be eclipsed by those he influenced. Although his weighty posthumous Collected Poems, published in 2013, is definitive, this landmark selection offers a potent dosage, easily pocketed by anyone headed “out into the world to watch the cataclysm begin.”