Lapis: New Poems

Lapis, the philosopher’s stone, is the legendary substance that alchemists use to turn base metals into gold. Robert Kelly’s 50-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 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. The range of Kelly’s interests and formal competence is enormous. He is inventive in the way that Picasso was: he can improvise intelligently and imaginatively on anything that strikes his ear, heart, or gaze. Kelly thinks of the poet as a scientist of holistic understanding, a world scholar to whom all data whatsoever is of use.