Represents the lifework of the visionary poet of the American postwar generation. In this book, the author aims to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process.

Foreword, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Acknowledgments High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia Editorial Note Touch of the Marvelous (1943--1949) The Touch of the Marvelous Plumage of Recognition The Islands of Africa I Am Coming Apparition of Charles Baudelaire The Ruins By the Curtain of Architecture There Are Many Pathways to the Garden Automatic World Hermetic Bird Moments of Exile Beneath this bed the caverns gather me like water I am a criminal when your body is bare upon the universe A Civil World Invisible The Enormous Window Mirror and Heart Infernal Landscape A Winter Day Awakened from Sleep The Diabolic Condition Celestial Estrangement Submarine Languor You and I Have Nothing to Fear The Image of Ardor To You Henry Miller of the Orchestra the Mirror the Revolver and of the Stars of Stars From Erotic Poems (1946) Upon the earth eyes opened in wonder You flee into a corridor of stars Scenario From Dark Illusion to Love's Reality I open for you an ancient book Nativity of Love Autumn Poems Answer from a Place of Waiting I am forlorn Sorrow Night Vision Unable to move and hardly breathing Spring's Entry Two Worlds--1946 A Simple Answer to the Enemy Poems 1943--1955 Ages in the Wind Symbols Another Autumn Coming The New Year Revelations of a New Order Break of Day This Room Is My Cosmos Descent Inside the Journey Animal Snared in His Revery Elementals Beneath occidental peripheries From Tau (1955) To see this evil from its core The Owl Shot into the Sun Going Forth by Day Ground grade guard the crucible Out of crystal beginnings In a garden that isn't, but will be Flame gates open to water gongs She sped to me a winter word To the Music Question To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar 18 beings and The Other Broken language hisses Ekstasis (1959) Preface Christ Fragments from an Aeroplane Interior Suck of the Night Iguana iguana Les Langueurs Allongees Sheri What gift to bring Ball Mysterium Mysticus Ecclesia Dead Smoke Deirdre In a grove Confirmation John Hoffman Ah Blessed Virgin Mary Man is in pain As some light fell The Poor Paradoxes Scorpion Bite Our Lady of the Snow The New Evil Boobus PUT DOWN McClure's Favorite Observatory What made tarot cards and fleurs de lis Terror Conduction Intersection It's summer's moment in autumn's hour It was a time I didn't see the beast Binoculars From Narcotica (1959) I Demand Extinction of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs! Bones Opium Cocaine Hemp Opium, Put Down of Laws against Opium! Memoria Poems 1955--1962 Scenes 1. Fud at Foster's 2. Immediate Life For Real Rest in Peace Inscription for the Vanishing Republic Orphic Poem The Call Politics Poem Lava That I burned by the screech owl castle in Berkeley Hills New York Blank Poem New York Cool Apocalypse Apocalypses Blank Poem for Poe Visions The marvelous unveils its face Did I appear in angeltime Last Days of San Francisco 34 Words Six Lines Time Is as Eternity Is: On the White Road: The Muse Witness Advent All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third! A Poem for John Wieners Written on His Paper Shooting down to L.A. in an open car The Juggler in the Desert Scat In every way i am dazzled by you Jet Powered Suicide My Labyrinth Why write about "things"? Chrism Song Make a poem your heart contained in mine It is because i cannot have you i have you Poem for Indians Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene) Rompi Crystals Kosmos Year of Weir Origins of Weir Destroyed Works Typescript (1948--1960) Destroyed Works (1962) Hypodermic Light It's absurd I can't bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire That the total hatred Old after midnight spasm They shot me full of holes U.S.S. San Francisco Immense blank void In camera of sempiternity you walk This World's Beauty Resurrections It is I who create the world and put it to rest A theater of masked actors in a trance I have never made a poem Mantic Notebook Apocamantica Fin del Mundo The poem says the bombs of America went off At the sleeper of inveterate cars The Apocalyptic The gods made a circle A gazelle fixated in clock work Lost in a crowd I've come to the time of brain crashed stars This is the night holding gum Sick of you, owl, talking nonsense in my head Empty visions blur my soul Secret Weapons Table of Visions Opus Magnum Deamin From the Front Still Poems Vacuous Suburbs This is the grey limit There's a mountain of houses upside down The night is a space of white marble There is this distance between me and what I see I have given fair warning Spansule Jeanlu Morning Light Song High Infernal Muses Crab The Bride Front and Back Till the End of Time Peroxide Subway Subconscious Mexico City New York How depressing here I am Parades melt eternally I cut out, I mean there was no proper head to the time A Note on DESTROYED WORKS and later Poems 1963--1964 Song for the Intellect Babbel/Is a lanaguage extending the sonic level Babbel/Ali ben buri de asalium New Babbel J. Weir Mumbles Bloody Neons From My Athens Terrace Ruin Going west east directionless pack to Indis At Random She's Appeared and Disappeared at Once From Selected Poems (1967) The Third Eye Blue Grace The Sun Is Bleeding over the Sky! The Ancients Have Returned Among Us She Speaks the Morning's Filigree Gork! Voice of Earth Mediums What Is Not Strange? Gothic Games Towers of the Rose Dawn Capricorn Is a Wounded Knee Astro-mancy After the Virus Coat of Arms Difficult First Steps Poems 1965--1970 Without Props There is no death, only sempiternal change Thorn of the Air The Flying Fix Poem for John Hoffman the Poet Interjections Let the tree shaped minion pinion the wonder of drugged dogs The Blood of the Air (1970) To the Reader The Libran Age I Touch You You wait you wail Altesia or the Lava Flow of Mount Rainier Blue Locus The Talisman Flaming Teeth Open your head of cisterns San Francisco melts as I come together The maginot line of poetry has not been invented With the opening of light in my soul Ephemeris Out of My Hat of Shoals Smile Berries Fantast The Faery Chambers Seattle Little hole of black hallucination on the wall The mosque of your eye has exploded Horse Angel The Comics Tonight Burned with Solar Slime Flaming Teeth Penetrant Tumors The Analog World without End Poems 1970--1980 A Little Washington DC Dream 3 Poems On the plain/of the angels A gorgon of the language cabal Flying beasts/are riveted on the air's toiling The Hand Moves the Word Flies Liberty Luminous Lady Only Creative Violence Reveals the Beauty of the Marvelous With the opening of light in my soul Panty Hose Stamped with the Head of the Medusa Between Sleep and Waking Tobacco of Harar Weight Becoming Visible (1981) Redwood Highway The Romantic Movement Bed of Sphinxes Primavera Becoming Visible Visibilities In Yerba Buena Oraibi Bile Nature Drama Set Ultima Thule Mask of Geometry Beyond This Trail of Crystal Rails Poe-Baudelaire, one echo-in-two Dissolving Lead The Erotic Limned Vibration Below the Surface Oneiric Reversal Openers Violet Star This Moment Eternal Medusa Precipitous Oracle Modular Prey Pulsate with stoppages Radiant Opal To Begin Then Not Now Life Sciences The Curtain of Magic Turns over Motors of Sleep The Fulcrum Loaded At the Emu's Domain The Jewels of the Vatican Board the Atlantic Cipher The Days Fall Asleep with Riddles The Uncertain Sciences Green Lion Oblique and Direct Hypochondriac Weather A Slice of the Atmosphere The Element You Love Time Traveler's Potlatch Notes Poems 1981--1985 Willow Wand Meadowlark West Sentiment for the Cordials of Scorpions Birder's Lament Poetics by Pluto Itinerary of Drift Bane Mexico City Central Moon Bird: Apparition of Charlie Parker Elegy on the Migrating Nightingales Massacred by Nuclear Physics at Chernobyl Meadowlark West (1986) Isn't Poetry the Dream of Weapons? Native Medicine Tree Surrealism in the Middle Ages West Ship of Seers Haven Root Invincible Birth Black Window America in the Age of Gold Wilderness Sacred Wilderness Sweetbrier The Romantist Reverie Has Its Reasons Virgo Noir Irrational Game's the Right Title Words I Dream Phi The Marco Polo Zone Zanoni A Western Border Town Buncombe Death Jets Fading Letters The Mysteries of Writing in the West Spring An American Place Fourth of July The Geometric Hallucination Reached the Turn Exorcist Exercises Other States There Shasta Poems 1986--1993 From No Closure Haiku for Satie Once In A Lifetime Starry Scape From Triads From Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems (1997) Poem for Andre Breton Ex Cathedra Unachieved Diana Green Egypt Egypt II Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga From Symbolon (1998--2001) To be served continually with this platter of nothingness Ultimate Zone Seraphim City Theoria Recall Pure Automatism Not with the cerebrating head Echo of St. Therese of the Child Jesus Facing branches of a flowering tree Hyper Sleep Humans Have Just a Few Genomes More Than Fruit Flies Today and yesterday are fusing Triple V: The Day Non-surrealism Became Surrealist Hidden Truth Selected Bibliography, Steven Fama Index of Titles and First Lines

“Philip Lamantia’s ‘Collected Poetry’ is beyond scale, weight, or measure. There is no proportion in this intertwining of soul-buildings. These are the inexorable and ineffable projects of an inspired consciousness set at full tilt in raging protest, kisses, prayers, blessings and outraged demands. All from the deepest silence and farthest travel. The reader’s excitement is carried by Lamantia’s spiritual and physical beat. This surreal and mantic project drives farther than anything before or after. Breathtaking! These works are of synesthetic beauty to the eye, the ear, and the open interior of the heart. They come from the peaks and herbs and forests where the meadowlark speaks.” —Michael McClure

"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 Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems

"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! Akhamatova in Lemuria!" —Clark Coolidge