Peter Everwine

1930—2018

Peter Everwine was born in Detroit and raised in western Pennsylvania. He published seven collections of poetry, including Listening Long and Late (2013), Figures Made Visible in the Sadness of Time (2003), and Collecting the Animals (1973), which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. Philip Levine once wrote that Everwine's poems “are like no other in our language: they possess the simplicity and clarity I find in the great Spanish poems of Antonio Machado and his contemporary Juan Ramon Jiminez but in contemporary American English and in the rhythms of our speech, that rhythm glorified. He presents us with poetry in which each moment is recorded, laid bare, and sanctified, which is to say the poems possess a quality one finds only in the greatest poetry.”
 
Everwine was the recipient of multiple awards and honors, including a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. His poetry was featured in the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, and others. He also translated poetry from the Hebrew and Aztec languages.

Everwine taught at the California State University, Fresno, and Reed College. He lived in Fresno, California, until his death in late 2018.