Lapis

Lapis, the philosophers stone, is the legendary substance that alchemists use to turn base metals into gold. Robert Kellys 50-year pursuit of its poetic equivalentthe words that transform the common things of life into artyields the 127 new texts collected here. In these richly varied poems and prose poemssome 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 adolescenceKelly 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.