The only American poet of his generation to fully embrace the discoveries of surrealism, Philip Lamantia has always gone against the grain, diverging from this century's dominant poetic expression, which has, with few exceptions, been realist and positivist. While many of his contemporaries followed in the footsteps of the self singing, democratic, nationalist Whitman or the not-so-democratic, objectivist Ezra Pound, Lamantia headed in a different direction. His American precursors are Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. "I have always dreamed," he writes, "of the ultimate triumph of the sirens, who, it was said, were 'defeated' in their poetic combat with the Muses, and who typify imaginative freedom from the restraints of rationally controlled poetry ...." Lamantia is neither craftsman nor chronicler. For him, "the unfettered imagination is the basis for poetry," and poetry a "disinterested means of emancipation tending toward the realization of objects of desire." The number...