Pass and Stow (Poems)

"Livewell’s lyrics, frequently set in his home city of Philadelphia, remind us that good poems are the guarantors of our pasts and of our places."
—David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems

David Livewell, whose first poetry collection Shackamaxon won the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, explores the difficult history of his hometown of Philadelphia and the many contradictions found in American life in his new collection, Pass and Stow.

John Pass and John Stow were foundry workers who recast the Liberty Bell in 1753, just down the street from where the poet was raised in the 1970s. The workers serve as emblems and reminders about the city’s layered past and what outward and inward repair can achieve. Like the bell, what we are given can be melted down, renewed, and used again. Philadelphia was the birthplace of the country and the first capital of the United States, but it also has docks where slaves were sold, names from displaced Native Americans, faint marks of religious persecution, vacant factories that had supported generations, and, in the writer’s childhood, scenes of race riots, drugs, violence, crime, and poverty.

In his Afterword, David Mason notes that many of the poems are set in “a city of memory and decay, endurance and mutability.” They offer moments of awareness, meditation, articulation, and consolation that can lead to artistic discovery. Old street games help redeem the past and the poet’s own family history. A ravaged North Philadelphia neighborhood also houses tough citizens with stories of adaptability and transcendence. Meditations on the somber lessons of the pandemic lead to poems that celebrate “custodians” who pass along history, skills, and friendship. Lastly, family poems and love poems affirm recent joys. In Pass and Stow, Livewell searches for a reunited and rejuvenated America, one that is forever unfolding from its past.