Robert Kelly Click here to see other works by Robert Kelly

Softcover, 224 pages ISBN 1-57423-186-3 $18.95

Lapis new poems by Robert Kelly Click here for an online preview of Lapis “Lapis offers dream narratives, elegies, prayers, anecdotes, parables, dialogues, and folktales from a land that may not exist. . . . Kelly has done something remarkable. He has given magic back its dignity, finding it in human warmth.” ––Joseph Donahue, Bookforum Lapis, the philosopher’s stone, is the legendary substance that alchemists use to turn base metals into gold. Robert Kelly’s fifty-year pursuit of its poetic equivalent––the words that transform the common things of life into art––yields the 127 new texts collected here. In these richly varied poems and prose poems––some occasioned by reading Dickinson and Yeats, visiting churches and art museums, traveling through Austria, France, Italy, and Ireland, and reliving the wounds the wounds of childhood and adolescence––Kelly describes personal experience and, by touching it with memory and imagination, makes it stranger than life itself. He is the diarist as dreamer, and the dreamer as alchemist. “Poem after poem builds on razor-sharp textures that draw the eye to the obvious and to the hidden world behind it,” said The Bloomsbury Review of Kelly’s previous collection, The Time of Voice. The same can be said of Lapis, for here again is poetry that gleams in the light of the numinous.