Denise Levertov

Margaret Fishback was a young woman searching for direction when she was inspired to write the poem "Footprints". The creation of the poem, its subsequent loss, and astonishing rediscovery are intertwined with a life full of challenge, adversity, and joy.

"The poems gathered here span the last three decades of Levertov's life, their subjects ranging from Vietnam to the death-squads of El Salvador to the first Gulf War." -- Back cover.

"Here are three of Denise Levertov's finest books: The Freeing of the Dust (1975), Life in the Forest (1978), and Candles in Babylon (1982). This new compilation - beginning where Denise Levertov's Poems 1968-1972 left off - testifies not only to Levertov's technical mastery, but also to her spiritual vision. Some of Levertov's best war poems, the result of her visit to North Vietnam in 1972, are contained in this collection. Poems 1972-1982 enables readers to observe a crucial phase in Levertov's poetic development."--BOOK JACKET.

"Denise Levertov, American poet and activist, died in December 1997 at the age of 74. This book contains some twenty previously uncollected interviews conducted between the early 1960s and the middle of the 1990s. They are focused primarily on her work as a poet but also on her social and political concerns." "The interviews in which Levertov discusses her craft constitute an important document on American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. She talks of her legendary friendship with her mentor William Carlos Williams and her association with the Black Mountain Poets. As she discusses her craft in great detail, she gives special attention to diction, line lengths, versification, and choice of subject matter. Students of American culture and readers of American poetry will be delighted by this collection of the personal views of one of the century's best poets."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams is the most engaging and lively of literary correspondences - at once a portrait of two geniuses, the testimony of their remarkable friendship, and a seedbed of ideas about American poetry. With a 1951 fan letter, the young British poet introduced herself to Williams, and by 1959, Williams is congratulating Levertov on her growth. The letters also chronicle their search (individually and together) for a set of formal poetic principles, a search which culminated for Levertov in 1965, when she coined the term "organic form."" "The warmth, the directness, the flavorsome individuality of the letters - 34 from Levertov and 42 from Williams - increased with their growing intimacy and mutual regard. Always intriguing, their independent-minded letters, which end with the elder poet's death in 1962, have great piquancy and charm." "Denise Levertov herself initiated this project, and was then, in the year before her death, "fascinated to read the exchange." This edition also includes the correspondence between Levertov and Williams's widow Florence. Professor Christopher MacGowan, the noted Williams scholar, contributes a superb introduction and informative annotations throughout."--BOOK JACKET.

Conceived as a convenience to those readers who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith. The Stream & The Sapphire presents a compact thematic grouping of thirty-eight poems, originally published in seven separate volumes. The earliest poem here dates from 1978, and though the sequence is not wholly chronological, "it does," as Denise Levertov remarks in her brief Foreword, "to some extent, trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much of doubt and questioning as well as affirmation."

As Denise Levertov comments in her brief foreword to The Life Around Us, she has "shared with most poets in every time and place an ardent love of what my eyes and other senses revealed to me in the world we call 'nature'." Yet in this selection of sixty-two poems chosen by the author "celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined." The Life Around Us shows us both the eternal renewal of the natural world and its imperilment.

Sands of the Well addresses the natural world, music, memory, aging, and belief. Her long study of the nature of spiritual insight here finds an ever more active professed engagement. In Sands of the Well Levertov allows the reader to sense the complexity under her perfect clarity of surface, and her music and precision bear us along to a new awareness of the "Primary Wonder".

"The first new volume in five years by the distinguished poet-teacher and MacArthur Fellow, of whose last collection, Harp Lake, Harold Bloom has written, "It confirms his authentic eminence, comparable in my judgment to that of Merrill, Ashbery, Ammons and only a few others in his own generation of American poets.""--BOOK JACKET. "The long and very beautiful title sequence, "Tesserae," winds its way through the book, embracing a varied and fascinating collection of lyrics, narratives, puzzles, and translations. It confirms the poet's reputation for dazzling ingenuity, technical brilliance, and erudition of a delightful kind, as when in "The See-Saw" he mocks, by way of nursery rhyme, one of the sillier statements of Hegel: "Of the remedies acting primarily on the body, the see-saw especially has proved efficacious, especially with raving lunatics. The see-saw movement induces giddiness in the patient and loosens his fixed ideas.""--BOOK JACKET. "John Hollander's Selected Poetry is published simultaneously with Tesserae. It provides a generous overview of a marvellous body of work spanning the thirty years from Hollander's first collection, A Crackling of Thorns, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, to Harp Lake, published in 1988."--BOOK JACKET.

Evening Train, Denise Levertov's new collection of poetry, is her twenty-first book with New Directions and one of her best. It shows Levertov at her most moving and musical, impressive and meditative, addressing the nature of faith, the imperiled beauty of the natural world (her new home in the Northwest brings mountains, herons, eagles), the horrors of the Gulf War, the pain and tenderness of love. What is remarkable throughout is the precision of her craft and her. Presence of mind: "Levertov's gift for detail," as the Village Voice noted, "is matched by the way she can make yearnings and ideas seem almost physical, as if she held them in the palm of her hand." Welling up through these poems is longing: longing for peace, for the survival of her cherished earth, for love, for the experience of the divine which comes like "a strain of music heard/then lost, then heard again." Contemplative, personal, universal, the poems reveal in. Themselves depth after depth.

Testifying to Levertov's growing strength and technical mastery as a poet, Poems 1968-1972 also affirms the clarity of her vision in its resistance to the Vietnam War and its "opposition to the whole system of insane greed of which war is only the inevitable expression.".

Now available. Here are the early poems which first brought Denise Levertov's work to prominence -- from early uncollected poems, selections from The Double Image (London, 1946), and her three books Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958) and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960), which established her as one of the more lyrical and most influential poets of the "New American" poetry.