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.
In her 21st collection, septuagenarian Levertov (Evening Train; Oblique Prayers) continues to find God in the natural world and in "human passions, cruelties, dreams, concepts, crimes, and the exercise of virtue." Nature, however, is what puts all of the latter in perspective and allows us to realize the divine. At their best, these poems, in the imagist tradition, transport a reader into the rendered scenes, the lines becoming like "oarstrokes over/ the waveless, dark,/ secretive water." While the last of the eight sections, "Close to a Lake," offers a heady brew of old and new testament faith, it is Levertov's more searching, personal reflections that ring truest: "...I lay low, evasive,/ imagining mortal weariness it's not yet time for." One feels, throughout, that the spirituality is in our own hands: "...when you seem to yourself/ nothing but a flimsy web/ of questions, you are given/ the questions of others to hold/ in the emptiness of your hands,/ songbird eggs that can still hatch/ if you keep them warm..../ You are given the questions of others/ as if they were answers/ to all you ask." (Apr.)
Many of these poems exist to reiterate, with calm assurance, the poet's faith in a force greater than herself: "Lord, I curl in Thy grey/ gossamer hammock/ that swings by one/ elastic thread to thin/ twigs that could, that should/ break but don't." The author of over 20 volumes of verse and prose, she is admirably successful in continuing to produce poems despite her professed moral and spiritual difficulties with the endeavor: "The yellow tulip in the room's warmth opens./ Can I say it and not seem to taunt/ all who live in torment?" Levertov, who is both Jewish and Christian, English and American, and who has been influenced by Eastern religion and the "open-form" aesthetics of the Black Mountain artists, is capable of a wide range of tones, the most formal of which is often the most moving: "For the first time, the certainty of return/ to this imprinted scene . . . / cannot be assumed." Recommended for all poetry collections.‘Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York, N.Y.
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