“Two Variations on a Theme by Kobayashi” is of course indebted to Kobayashi's film, Hari Kari. The speaker of the second half of the poem is the Samurai warrior, and central character, of the film.

Both “The Assimilation of the Gypsies” and “Sensationalism” are personal interpretations of Koudelka's photographs. Although some incidents in both poems are corroborated by historical fact, neither poem is meant to suggest that such facts are necessarily the facts of either photograph.

The poems in this book are arranged in the approximate chronological order of their writing. The book was begun in Iowa City in 1980 and finished in Bucharest in 1983.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LARRY LEVIS was born in Fresno, California, in 1946. He received his B.A. in English at California State University, Fresno, his M.A. in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, and in 1974 a Ph.D. in Modern Letters at the University of Iowa. His first book of poems, Wrecking Crew, won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1972. His second book, The Afterlife, won the Lamont Award of the American Academy of Poets in 1976. In 1981 The Dollmaker's Ghost was a winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. His fourth collection, Winter Stars, was published in 1985 in the Pitt Poetry Series. Among his awards are three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, he lives in Salt Lake City.