The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov

by Denise Levertov, Paul A. Lacey (Editor), Eavan Boland (Introduction)

Overview

The landmark collected work of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, now in paperback.

How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov’s Collected Poems presents her marvelous, groundbreaking work in full.

Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as “the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.” A staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers. New Directions is proud to publish this landmark collected poems of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811221740
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/21/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1092
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was a British born American poet. She wrote and published 20 books of poetry, criticism, translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honors, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Eavan Boland is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction. A professor and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University, she is the winner of a Lannan Foundation Award. She lives in Stanford, California, and Dublin, Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/28/2013
Everything is threatened, but meanwhile/ everything presents itself”: Levertov’s late-career exclamation might serve as a motto for this earnest, enormous, gathering of her once-celebrated, still controversial poems, a collection that could prompt a revival. Present-day critics and poets remember her unadorned free verse of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its clear focus on real things, alongside her fierce, copious, overtly political (some said strident, or shrill) writings from the 1960s and 1970s, against the war in Vietnam, and then for other public causes (antinuclear, antipoverty, El Salvadoran): “While we lie in the road to block traffic from the air force base,/ over there the dead are strewn in the roads.” No reader can avoid Levertov’s politics; but this volume reveals, if not many different styles, at least many other topics and goals over 19 books and six decades. Born and raised in England, of Jewish heritage, Levertov (1923–1997) settled first in northern California, and then outside Boston: British childhood, Mexican travels, protest-era Berkeley, and latter-day New England all inform her landscape and memories. So do other poets’ lives, French and American; sex and (remarkably) amicable divorce; an allegorical adopted pig; the early death of her sister; and, in Levertov’s final collections, the saints and pieties of Christian belief. “What is the revolution I’m driven/ to name, to live in?” she asked in To Stay Alive (1971), but the revolution was only the beginning. If Levertov found it “difficult to write/ of the real image, real hand, the heart/ of day or autumn,” her poetry often did it nevertheless; though she became known for protests, even for rage, her best work shows her at her happiest: “you whose joy is a kite/ now dragged in dirt, now/ breaking the ritual of sky.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Denise Levertov was musical, fierce, absolute in her honesty, and, for us, her public, as indispensable as any modern poet. To young writers asking for direction, Denise Levertov’s name comes to my tongue, always, among the very first of our important forebears. Her work was, and is, a brave gift to us all."

Mary Oliver

"Levertov’s mastery—more than mastery, because she is one of the originators—of contemporary poetic form, informed with a fierce, generous intelligence, can be frightening."

Ursula K. Le Guin

"One of the most vitally innovative of contemporary poets."

World Literature Today

"A touchstone, a maintainer for our generation. She was a constantly defining presence in the world we shared, a remarkable and transforming poet for all of us."

Robert Creeley

"Levertov's mastery - more than mastery, because she is one of the originators - of contemporary poetic form, informed with a fierce, generous intelligence, can be frightening."

The Washington Post - Ursula Le Guin

"Book by book, I have read her poems for their subtle music, for their imagination, for their author's dignity and integrity and grace; and most of all, for the indomitable and humble spirit that hungers there."

The American Poetry Review

"In every era there are just a few poets whose work - for its sheer lyric conscience - carries poetry safely into the future. Denise Levertov, as this books shows, is one of them."

Eavan Boland

"Levertov's gift for details is matched by the way she can make yearnings and ideas seem almost physical, as if she had them in the palm of her hand."

The Village Voice Literary Supplement