This third and concluding volume in the grand "life trilogy" of Everson's complete poems -- following The Residual Years: Poems 1934-1948 and The Veritable Years: Poems 1949-1966, both reissued last year by Black Sparrow -- brings into focus for the first time the full sweep of one of the great accomplishments of American poetry.

A poet of moral conscience, natural landscape and spiritual meditation, Everson produced work of astonishing intellectual energy, kinetic power and symbolic resonance in these writings of his later years -- his output from the last days of his life as a lay brother (Brother Antoninus) through his departure from religious orders, marriage, and resumption of a secular name and career.

the sea lions are gone. In their place,

Beyond the white line of the breakers,

Drifts a gaggle of surfers, oblique on their boards,

Facing seaward.

From the shore

One sees but the tilted torsos,

Tense shoulders, the alert heads.

They look to the far

Wrinkling of the sea, surmisin increment:

Which influx of the swell, impending,

Will coalesce into consequentiality,

Engender thrust, and, reaching forward,

Stoop towering in, all ultimate

Augmentation?

This, in their mind's eye,

Is the vision of beatitude:

The great wave of their wonder.