Selected Poems

by Denise Levertov, Paul A. Lacey (Editor), Robert Creeley (Preface by)

Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of her writing life, The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov offers a chronological overview of her great body of work. It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her ground-breaking poetry -- the work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature."

Genres: Poetry, Womens, Unfinished, The United States Of America, Female Authors

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

American poet Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England. Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, was Welsh. Her father, Paul Levertoff, from Germany migrated to England as a Russian Hassidic Jew, who, after converting to Christianity, became an Anglican parson. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. In 1940, when she was 17, Levertov published her first poem.

During the Blitz, Levertov served in London as a civilian nurse. Her first book, The Double Image, was published six years later. In 1947 she married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States in the following year. Although Levertov and Goodman would eventually divorce, they had a son, Nickolai, and lived mainly in New York City, summering in Maine. In 1955, she became a naturalized American citizen.

During the 1960s and 70s, Levertov became much more politically active in her life and work. As poetry editor for The Nation, she was able to support and publish the work of feminist and other leftist activist poets. The Vietnam War was an especially important focus of her poetry, which often tried to weave together the personal and political, as in her poem "The Sorrow Dance," which speaks of her sister's death. Also in response to the Vietnam War, Levertov joined the War Resister’s League.

Much of the latter part of Levertov’s life was spent in education. After moving to Massachusetts, Levertov taught at Brandeis University, MIT and Tufts University. On the West Coast, she had a part-time teaching stint at the University of Washington and for 11 years (1982-1993) held a full professorship at Stanford University. In 1984 she received a Litt. D. from Bates College. After retiring from teaching, she traveled for a year doing poetry readings in the U.S. and England.

In 1997, Denise Levertov died at the age of 74 from complications due to lymphoma. She was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington.

Levertov 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.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

from Selected Poems by Denise Levertov


Living Alone (I)
(from The Freeing of the Dust, 1975)

In this silvery now of living alone,
doesn't it seem, I ponder,
anything can happen?
On the flat roof of a factory
at eye level from my window,
starling naiads dip in tremulous rainpools
where the sky floats, and is no smaller
than long ago.
Any strange staircase, as if I were twenty-one-
any hand drawing me up it,
could lead me to my life.
Some days.

And if I coast, down toward home, spring evenings, silently,
a kind of song rising in me to encompass
Davis Square and the all-night
cafeteria and the pool hall,
it is childhood's song, surely no note is changed,
sung in Valentines Park or on steep streets in the map of my mind
in the hush of suppertime, everyone gone indoors.
Solitude within multitude seduced me early.

[Lisajean · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s nice to read poems about joy and marriage and beauty instead of just loneliness and angst!

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across Levertov years ago in a poetry anthology. Now, I can’t recall which anthology it was, or what poem of hers caught my eye. Yet, I kept her on my list for years, and when I finally settled down with Selected Poems, I knew I’d come home.

Levertov led a fascinating life: a childhood in Wales, adulthood in London and the USA, connections with William Carlos Williams. Her father was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Levertov herself went from skepticism to pantheism to Christianity. Her later poems are marked by her Christian faith, when she writes about Caedmon, Julian of Norwich, St Thomas Didymus, the Annunciation, the icon of the harrowing of hell, Velazquez’s painting of the servant girl at Emmaus, and more.

While I’m a strict formalist in writing and reading preferences, Levertov managed to hook me with her free verse. Oddly enough, at first, it was her gentle pantheism that drew me in. Aren’t many poets pantheists, or panentheists, of a sort? Her religious poems toward the end of the collection are what mark her as a new favorite. While I like religious poetry as a rule, Levertov's excellent work on Mary and Julian of Norwich made her a soul sister. Along with Rossetti, Herbert, Donne, Hopkins, and Dickinson, I'll put Levertov's poems to devotional use.

Beyond all of this, Levertov is an important American poet (somehow, we get to claim her) and known on the global scale. She's important to read because of her impact on Williams and others, but also because her work is so good. The central images of her poems are not overcrowded with obsessive style or technical posturing. Only mature poets reach that level, and Levertov had a long, mature career.

Since I can’t just paste the whole book to this review, here is a selection of favorite passages and shorter poems.

“The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416”
From Part 5
She lived in dark times, as we do:
war, and the Black Death, hunger, strife,
torture, massacre. She knew
all of this, she felt it,
sorrowfully, mournfully,
shaken as men shake
a cloth in the wind.

From “Annunciation”
She did not cry, ‘I cannot, I am not worthy,’
nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

From “Flickering Mind”
Lord, not you, it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away--and back,
circling.
….Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere, everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.

“The Love of Morning”
It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we’ve lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror. . . .

God has saved the world one more day
even with its leaden burden of human evil;
we wake to birdsong.
And if sunlight’s gossamer lifts in its net
the weight of all that is solid,
our hearts, too, are lifted,
swung life laughing infants;

but on gray mornings,
all incident--our own hunger,
the dear tasks of continuance,
the footsteps before us in the earth’s
belovéd dust, leading the way--all,
it is hard to love again
for we resent a summons
that disregards our sloth, and this
calls us, calls us.

From “Conversion of Brother Lawrence”
Not work transformed you; work, even drudgery,
was transformed: that discourse
pierced through its monotones, infused them
with streams of sparkling color.

Your secret was not the craftsman’s delight in process,
which doesn’t distinguish work from pleasure--
your way was not to exalt nor avoid
the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant:
everything faded, thinned to nothing, beside
the light which bathed and warmed, the Presence
your being had opened to. Where it shone,
There life was, and abundantly; it touched
your dullest task, and the task was easy.
Joyful, absorbed,
you ‘practiced the presence of God’ as a musician
practices hour after hour his art:
‘A stone before the carver,’
you ‘entered into yourself.’

“Primary Wonder”
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and the problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

[Kevin P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five poets in one, you'll see in this book. How do you like that Yoda voice? Romantic, Black Mountain Poet, Protest Poet, Earth Poet, Spiritual Poet. What's overlooked is that although "content" becomes what rules her later work, "organic form," is its vessel.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The early stuff is pretty great. The protest stuff (Vietnam) better than expected, but still dated. It seems like a lot of the protest poetry filtered was out for this selected edition. (Good.) I had no idea Levertov was or would become a Christian (Catholic) poet. The poem or poem sequence, Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus, is profound religious poetry at its best. Unfortunately only excerpts are available on line. (It's not THAT long.)

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book in August 2006. The inscription from my friend reads "Poems to heal the body."

I love poetry although I am not a poet. Good poetry reminds me of high school when I sat in LA coffee shops smoking cloves and dreaming of being a suicide-free Sylvia Plath. Although I was filled with the typical teenage angst, I was also full of hope and promise. Good poetry always brings me back to that feeling of hope and promise.

I love the simplicity clarity and grace of Levertov's writing.

In this collection by Levertov, "The Prayer for Revolutionary Love" remains flagged by a dog-eared page. When I first found this poem it became a promise and commitment made in my current relationship. I'll share it here:

That a woman not ask a man to leave meaningful work to follow her.
That a man not ask a woman to leave meaningful work to follow him.

That no one try to put Eros in bondage.
But that no one put a cudgel in the hands of Eros.

That our loyalty to one another and our loyalty to our work not be set in false conflict.

That our love for each other give us love for each other's work.
that our love for each other's work give us love for one another.

That our love for each other's work give us love for one another.
That our love for each other give us love for each other's work

That our love for each other, if need be, give way to absence. And the unknown.

That we endure absence, if need be,
without losing our love for each other.
Without closing our doors to the unknown.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

The golden particles
descend, descend,
traverse the water’s
depth and come to rest
on the level bed
of the well until,
the full descent
accomplished, water’s
absolute transparence
is complete, unclouded
by constellations
of bright sand

[Emily Magnus · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems were hit or miss for me. Some of them got explanation points beside them and some of them made zero sense to me, but hey that’s showbiz I suppose! A human whose mind I think the world of recommended these poems so it was a MUST- and definitely some take aways. Poetry will always leave me nodding my head in awe of the purpose of words and how simply things can be captured. Bonus points for this lil line: “To be. To love another only for being.” Ugh 🥺

POTB (poem of the booook):

To Speak

“To Speak of sorrow
Works upon it
Moves it from its
Crouched place barring
The way to and from the soul’s hall-
Out in the light it
Shows clear, whether
Shrunken or known as
A giant wrath-
Discrete
At least, where before
Its great shadow joined
The walls and roof and seemed
To upload the hall like a beam.”

[Surya V.n · Rating 4 out of 5]

❤️
Talking to Grief
-Denise Levertov


Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

[Dani Fino · Rating 5 out of 5]

despite
all that i witnwssed
his question remained
my question

[Adnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think she knows something we don't (the road to the mother toilet)

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 5 out of 5]

The career of the late Denise Levertov was marked by an extraordinary fecundity of voice, subject, and expression. To read this slim but cannily assembled Selected Poems is to trace the half-century development of a poetic sensibility that was fearless and wide-ranging to a degree, I think, unmatched by any American poet of the 20th century save, perhaps, Stevens and Lowell. Like De Kooning or Yeats -- like all truly great artists -- Levertov's poetry underwent a long process of transformation, helpfully if somewhat schematically characterized by editor Paul Lacey as having three essential phases: the celebratory, the political, and the religious. That the political poems can seem faintly dated, and that the religious ones are sometimes dull and obvious, seems hardly to matter in the face of the ferocity and streamlined power that her best poems summon. Some of them are such crystalline expressions of feminism, femininity, sex and longing, power and lust -- the "amnesia of the heart," the "silvery now of living alone" -- that I can hardly understand how they have eluded my attention all these long years. Ah well.

[Regis Neilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a few of the poems from this collection for one of my first college English classes and decided that a decade later would be a good time to revisit them in the context of the collection as a whole. I spent about four months with this book and am really glad I did. Reading the whole book lets you follow the trajectory of Levertov’s life in terms of her changing relationships, politics, and faith. As with any poetry collection, I didn’t love every poem in this book, but there are lots of gems here if you like more of a modern, unrhymed poetry style, which Levertov refers to as organic form.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to say I loved her voice & the journey of reading her life's work. I found certain lines & stanzas & sections of her poems to be exquisite. Her later work focusing on politics and religion does, as her critics claim, become a bit strident; however, in both of those subjects Levertov finds origins of truth & transcends the now while pushing the reader to consider her own purpose, significance, and troubles. I wish the world stopped and thought a bit more like Levertov does; we'd all be far better off for it.

[Amy Grondin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this selection of Denise Levertov's poems; she is a poet that I have encountered only sporadically, but I've meant for a long time to take a deeper dive into her work. This book was laid out chronologically, and I could clearly see the way her thinking and writing changed as she lived and grew, and her circumstances changed. There were poems here about nature, myth, politics, writing, human nature, relationships, God and meaning...but regardless of topic I found her poetic voice wise, humane, and challenging.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lotta good ones in here.

[Amber Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

"O language, mother of thought,
are you rejecting us as we reject you?

Language, coral island
accrued from human comprehensions,
human dreams,

you are eroded as war erodes us."

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must have come across the name at some point during my time studying modern and postmodern poetry at university - but if I did it didn't stick. Then again, at university they weren't big on emphasising the bits of an influential poet's biography where she or he converts to Christianity... and of course, as an eager Christian kid, that would have been the part that caught my attention. I was on the hunt for literary and intellectual heroes.

My recent interest in Levertov was piqued by a collection of beat poems that I purchased from City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco a few years ago. She emerged as my favourite of the bunch in that book, and you could sense the contemplative / mystical way of seeing in her work. So I added her to my expansive Book Depository wishlist, then one day, a couple of years later, made my purchase.

Denis Levertov was born in England towards the end of the first quarter of the 20th century. She was the daughter of a Russian Hasidic Jew who had emigrated to the UK, converted to Christianity and become an Anglican vicar. Her mother, from congregationalist stock, was descended from a Welsh mystic and tailor named Angel Jones.

Levertov went to America and connected with a range of influential American poets such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Creeley.

During the years up until the end of the 1970s, she, by her own words, inhabited "a regretful skepticism which sought relief in some measure of pantheism." But a thorough-going contemplative approach was ever part of her poetic method (as evidenced by an excerpt from an essay that she penned in the mid 1960s that I found in 'The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry').

Sometime in the very early 1980s she worked on a poem called 'Mass for the Day of St Thomas Didymus' (aka Doubting Thomas). Though it worked its way through the liturgical stages of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei), it was intended to be agnostic in tone. She worked on it over the course of months and "when I arrived at the Agnus Dei, I discovered myself to be in a different relationship to the material and to the liturgical form from that in which I had begun. The experience of writing the poem - that long swim through waters of unknown depth - had also been a conversion process..." (quoted in the essay at the end of the book).

She found welcoming community in a Catholic church near her home in Seattle. Her remaining publications (seven volumes), until her death in 1997, are very Christian in theme. This had happened to someone who Kenneth Rexroth had said, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry ... to the mainstream of world literature." In the introductory essay to this volume, Robert Creeley notes his perplexity that she should have joined Catholicism, but accepts that she must have had good reasons.

The net result of her life's work for me as a reader and creative is that I love her sensibility. I'm meant to really like poetry, but I don't enjoy reading it all that much in general and seldom feel at home. With Levertov I do.

Of the great Christian poets, I enjoy bits of John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins and such. But with Levertov, my inclination is to put her right up there, one rung down from my favourite, T.S. Eliot. I can see that from the little bits I've read too that her poetics and prose are going to capture me. I can break my attraction down by mentioning contemplative approaches and such, but really it just is. I like her, and feel I think I know her.

[Matthew Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book at a grab-bag library book sale, unfamiliar with Levertov's work and not knowing what to expect. Not all of the poems interested me, but her religious poems are some of the best poems I've ever read! She's able to embody faith as an intense mystical experience in her poems by running toward, and not away from, the harsh violence of the world. She does this in other poems as well. Her poetry about the Vietnam war is fierce and visceral. And she's able to make something as simple as forgetting to notice the beauty of a mountain feel devastating. Levertov is a new favorite of mine, and despite not every poem clicking with me, I feel like this is a collection I will be returning to again and again over the years.

Here's just one of the many brilliant poems of the book, which changed how I viewed the story of The Passion I've heard about time and time again:

"On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived until after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out this agony? What's
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain's the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn't a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?

This air we're breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky's
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who've held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.

But Julian's lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day's endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is 'King of Grief'.
The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies

—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to the last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn't explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when He took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.<\i>"

[Will Norrid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Levertov is brilliant, and we can be grateful that her career spanned so long that her craft grew and expanded and contracted and billowed out to bless us as readers across the six decades. This edition has a forward by Robert Creeley that is both praising of her art and gracious to her as a person- one born of long experience and differences over the direction of life and work. Collections and career retrospectives can often seem disjointed, but I believe the arrangement of the poems and Creeley's introductory material help us to know Levertov a bit more off the page and will drive many readers to seek out more about her life and work.

A strong collection gathering enough of each time to see the development and creation (and perhaps recreation) of her poetic voice.

[Karith Amel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this collection cover-to-cover on my silent retreat. It was a beautiful/powerful experience, watching Levertov's worldview shift. Watching her come to faith in and through her poetry.

I liked many of the poems throughout, but I found myself loving her religious poetry and some of her later work. Her poems about the apostle Thomas and Julian of Norwich were particularly powerful.

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems assembled here illustrate Levertov's many journeys: from "English" to "American;" from agnosticism to Christianity to Catholicism; from the influence of William Carlos Williams and his contemporaries to her own Beat-adjacent sensibility to political poems; into the personal and onward into an expansive view of nature/the environment.

[Jacob Binder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection, although I most enjoyed the soft mystique of Levertov's earlier poems, which then cedes to the more overt political and religious themes of her later poems. But there are gems throughout, of course.

[hing · Rating 4 out of 5]

levertov did something that literally nothing else has managed to do to me before and since she made me think omg.... in high school no less............

[Zachary B Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant collection and a beautiful poet. Levertov has changed how I see the world through the connections between temporal and spiritual life.

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

refreshingly joyful....

[Krista Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite - no religious poems. But loved
"The Lesson"
Martha, 5, scrawling a drawing, murmurs
"These are two angels. These are two bombs. They
are in the sunshine. Magic
is dropping from the angels' wings."
Nik, at 4, called
over the stubble field, "Look,
the flowers are dancing underneath the
tree, and the tree
is looking down with all its apple-eyes."
Without hesitation or debate,words
used and at once forgotten.

And loved "The Great Dahlia"
Great lion-flower, whose flames
are tipped with white,
so it seems each petal's fire
burns out in snowy ash,

a dawn bird will light
on the kitchen table
to sing at midday for you

and have you noticed?
a green spider came with you
from the garden where they cut you,
to be the priest of your temple.

Burn, burn the day. The wind
is trying to enter and praise you.
Silence seems something you have chosen,
witholding your bronze voice.
We bow before your pride.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Denise Levertov is one of those poets that I appreciate as much for the person she was as I do the poetry she wrote. This collection spans her lifetime and allows the reader to trace the development of her spirituality, in particular (and less so the political activism which I admired). I suppose I would connect with her more if that development had brought her somewhere other than the Catholic Church, but there is a fine sensibility communicated, one that allows you to get past your own spiritual biases and enjoy her vision. For example, "And then once more/ all is eloquent--rain,/ raindrops on branches, pavement brick/ humbly uneven, twigs of storm-stripped hedge revealed/ shining deep scarlet, speckled whistler shabby and/ unconcerned, anything--all/ utters itself, blessedness/ soaks the ground and its wintering seeds."

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book in April for National Poetry Month, but didn't finish it until July. Give yourself some time to wade through slowly and reflect. I couldn't force myself to plow through and be done quickly.

Denise Levertov is one of my favorite poets. I enjoyed reading through this collection and seeing how her poetry evolved over her lifetime of work. I also enjoyed the forward and afterword biographies which gave context to her poems.

Would recommend to anyone interested in poetry, period.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We must breathe time as fishes breathe water."

It's not just that I share her politics and her faith—though I'm sure that helps. The precision and range of the images sells me on this work. I haven't taken more genuine wisdom from my daily reading since ... probably when it was Rilke, three years ago. Clearly I need to read more poetry!