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 Allongées
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. Füd 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 André 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