Lapis

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.