Life In the Forest

by Denise Levertov

Life in the Forest  is Denise Levertov’s first major collection since the publication in 1975 of  The Freeing of the Dust , winner of the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize, and is her eleventh book with New Directions, in a connection of nearly twenty years’ standing. Ms. Levertov’s work holds that tenuous yet inspiring ground between reflection and discourse. The dynamics of this sensitive balance is pointed up in  Life in the Forest  by a thematic grouping which invites internal association from poem to poem and section to section. “The poems I had been moving towards,” she explains, “were impelled by two first, a recurring need…to vary a habitual lyric mode; not to abandon it, by any means, but from time to time explore more expansive means; and second, the decision to try to avoid over use of the autobiographical, the dominant first-person singular of so much American poetry―good and bad―of recent years.”

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 17, 1978

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

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't expect to like it, and at first I didn't, but then I did. Levertov has a lot of thought-provoking images and phrases. Most of the poems here are about love and relationships or her mother's slow death. These poems make me glad to be a woman.

[Bethany Johnsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I bought this book because of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The reason I’m pretty sure is that Levertov’s perfect phrase “the blue of your absence” struck me as very familiar, and who else has written so obsessively about other people writing about blues? And I remember that book was full of allusions to books that it made me want to read. But I’m not positive, and I can’t check, because my copy of Bluets is in a box in California and I am on a plane to Hawaii. (“I am wayfaring in the middle of the world.”)

My favorite section is “Modulations for Solo Voice.” Those are the first poems in the volume that I absolutely loved, that connected with me. Levertov says in her introductory note that the first section, “Homage to Pavese,” is an attempt at a less autobiographical poetry—at poems about other people. Maybe I am less interested in the poet projecting herself into outside stories than about Denise Levertov (or should I say the speaker). Maybe there just weren’t as many formulations of language that struck me for their beauty in the first two sections (though there were some; the opening of the second section, “Continuum”—

Milk to be boiled
egg to be poached
pot to be scoured.)

But I want to go back now and see what can be teased from them, with patience and attention, those more mysterious, close-petaled poems poems of the first sections, because “Modulations” grabbed me so hard with fresh expressions of the pain I (and probably most people who have any interest in poetry) have felt. I have myself been “A Woman Pacing Her Room, Rereading a Letter, Returning Again and Again to Her Mirror.” It’s hard to pick a favorite among so many perfect little utterances, but one of mine is definitely “Psyche in Somerville.” (I’ve always loved the Psyche myth.) The wavering of the speaker about what she would have done in Psyche’s mystical situation:

If I were Psyche how could I not bring the lamp to our bedside?
I would have known in advance
all the travails my gazing
would bring, more than Psyche
ever imagined,
and even so, how could I not have raised
the amber flame to see
the human person I knew
was to be revealed.
She did not even know! She dreaded
a beast and discovered
a god. But I
know, and hunger
again to witness the form
of mortal love itself.

That wonder, when in the first flush of something good—and perhaps after loneliness—is it a beast or a god or your mortal love or all three, or is it, as she writes in “Epilogue”

I thought I had found a swan
But it was a migrating snow-goose.

The darkness, love’s darkness as you cling to someone you can’t actually see, in almost perfect satisfaction, but for your desire to see them, to find out if they’re a beast, a goose; but on second thought you’re too scared to lose the sensation of their skin on yours and the feelings that gives you. So

I was wrong! If I were Psyche
I would live on in darkness, and endure
the foolish voices, barking of aeolian dogs,
the desert glitter
of days full of boring treasures,
walking on precious stones till my feet hurt,

to hold you each night and be held
close in your warmth in a pitchblack cave of a room

and not have to wait
for Mercury, dressed in the sad gray coat of a mailman
and no wings on his feet,
to bring me your words.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We work in the dark. We do what we can.
We give what we have. Our doubt is our
passion. Our passion is out task. The rest
is the madness of art."
- Henry James, "The Middle Years"

Life in the Forest is divided into five sections, or five sequences, described as "thematic grouping": HOMAGE TO PAVESE, CONTINUUM, MODULATIONS FOR SOLO VOICE, ADMIRING A WATERFALL, and LIFE IN THE FOREST. The thematic approach to the grouping is generally apparent. For example, the poems of CONTINUUM are the most overtly political, the poems of ADMIRING A WATERFALL are the most overtly romantic...

[...]
How brief it was, that time
when Chile showed us how to rejoice!
How soon the executioners
arrived, making victims
of those who were not born to be victims.

The throats of singers
were punched into silence,
hands of builders
crushed,
dancers herded
into the pens.
[...]
- For Chile, 1977 (from CONTINUUM)


Our large hands
Your small hands

Our country's power
Our powerlessness against it

Your country's poverty
The power of your convictions

Our corrupt democracy
The integrity of your revolution

Our technology and its barbarity
Your ingenuity and simple solutions

Our bombers
Your bicycles

Our unemployed veterans
Your re-educated prostitutes

Our heroin addicts rotting
Your wounded children healing

Our longing for new life
Your building of new life

Our large hands
Your small hands
- Greeting to the Vietnamese Delegates to the U.N. (from CONTINUUM)


I've never written poems for you, have I.
You rarely read poems,
your mind thrives
on other fruits and grains:

but just this once
a poem; to say:

As unthought gesture, turns of
common phrase, reveal
the living of life -
pathos, courage, comedy;

as in your work you witness
and show others
people's ordinary and always strange
histories;

so you give me from myself
an open secret,

a language other than my language, poetry,
in which to rest myself with you,

in which to laugh with you;

a cheerful privacy
like talking Flemish on a bus in Devon.
- For X . . . (from ADMIRING A WATERFALL)

What you give me is

the extraordinary sun
splashing its light
 into astonished trees.

A branch
of berries, swaying

under the feet of a bird.

I know
other joys - they taste
bitter, distilled as they are 
from roots, yet I thirst for them.

But you - 
you give me
the flash of golden daylight
in the body's 
midnight,
warmth of the fall noonday
between the sheets in the dark.
 - Love Poem for X (from ADMIRING A WATERFALL)

The thematic approach, however, is not always apparent, either in the overall sequence or the individual poems. But this enables Levertov the freedom to explore a diversity of subject matter, rather than feeling restricted to a theme. For example, a poem entitled "Chekhov on the West Heath", from the HOMAGE TO PAVESE sequence, takes as its subject Anton Chekhov, as Levertov explains in the Introductory Note: "The poem in Homage to //pavese called 'Chekhov on the West Heath' grew out of being asked to contribute something to the Chekhov Festival organized by James McConkey at Cornell University early in 1977"...

[...]
The war is simply
how the worlds, to which they were born.
They share
the epiphanies of their solitude,
hardly knowing or speaking to anyone else
their own age. They have not discovered men
or sex at all. But daily
they live! Live
intensely. Mysterious fragrance
gentles the air
under the black poplars.
And Bet, looking off toward hawthorn and willow,
middle-distance of valley and steep small hills,
says she would like to bounce
from one round-topped tree to another,
in the spring haze.
[...]
- Chekhov on the West Heath

Incidentally, Chekhov appears in a later poem, "Like Loving Chekhov", from the MODULATIONS FOR SOLO VOICE sequence...

Loving this man who is far away
is like loving Anton Chekhov.
I have loved him longer than I have known this man.
I love all the faces of Chekhov in my collection
of photos that show him in different years of his life,
alone, or with brothers and sisters, with actors,
 with Gorki,
with Tolstoi, with his wife, with his undistinguished
endearing pet dogs; from beardless student to since-nez'd
famous and ailing man.
 I have no photo
of the man I love.
[...]
 - Like Loving Chekhov

My favourite sequence in the collection is MODULATIONS FOR SOLO VOICE, in part because Levertov adheres more strictly to a sequential form. This strict adherence, however, has resulted in a sequence that ironically appears less constricted. There is a freedom in the language and in the fragmented form of this sequence, a form that is perhaps most fully realized here than in any other of Levertov's poems...

MODULATIONS FOR SOLO VOICE

These poems were written in the winter and spring of 1974-75, and might be subtitled, from the cheerful distance of 1978, Historia de un amor. They are intended to be read as a sequence.

"There are the lover and the beloved, but
these two come from different countries."

- Carson McCullers,
The Ballad of the Sade Cafe

My favourite poem in the MODULATIONS FOR SOLO VOICE sequence...

i

Easily we are happy, I was thinking, no need
for so much grieving,
ashen mind, heart flaming, flaming
from core of stone.

Easy days, nights when our bodies
were learning each other.


ii

But that perfection, nectarine of light-
you bruised it.
Impeccably conscientious,
gave it a testing pinch,
reminding me of my status
in the country of your affections:
secondclass citizen.

Don't you know I hate to be told 
what I know already?
Remember the custodian telling us,
'This chair is beautiful,
this is a beautiful table'?
What I knew I'd taken already
on terms of my own:
not as defeat but with new freedom -
 from false pride,
 from measuring my value to you
 in a jeweller's finicky scale.

(And the heart's affections are holy,
we have known that, but have loved
to hear it again for the sake of
his life who said it. And what the Imagination seizes
as beauty must be truth -
yet there are hierarchies within that truth.)


iii

Nectarine of our pleasure,
enclosed in its own fragrance,
poised on its imaginary branch!
I imagine too quickly, giving to tenuous things
hasty solidity,
to irresolute shadows
a perfect equilibrium.

For you, then,
our days and nights had not been a river
flowing at leisure between grassy banks?

You thought I would try 
to force the river
out of its course?

You didn't trust me . . .


iv

Or perhaps indeed
we did after all
share our pleasure,
halving the nectarine -

bu even as we drifted
downstream at ease
and golden juices
stained your mind's tongue,

Anxiety arrived from your hometown
wearing black,
waving her umbrella?


v

Since I must recover
my balance, I do. I falter
bu don't fall; recalling
how every vase, cut sapphire, absolute
dark rose, is not indeed
of rarest, of most cherished
perfection unless flawed,
offcentered, pressed
with rough thumbprint, blade scratch, brown
birthmark that tells
of concealed struggle from bud to open ease
of petals, soon
to loosen, to drop and
be blown away.

 The asymmetrical
tree of life, fractionally, lopsided
at the trunk's live-center 
tells where a glancing eye,
 not a ruler
drew, and drew strength
from its mistake.

The picture of perfection
must be revised.
Allow for our imperfections,
welcome them,
consume them into its substance.
Bring from necessity
its paradoxical virtue,
mortal life, that makes it
give off so strange a magnetic
shining, when one had thought
darkness had filled the night.


vi

These questions
that have walked beside all that I say,
waiting their turn for utterance:

 How do I free myself
 from pain self-imposed,

 pride-pain,
 will-pain,

 pain of wanting
 never to feel superfluous?

 How are you acted on
 by anxiety, by a coldness
 taught to you as a boy?

- these questions 
are not mine only.
The vision

of river, of nectarine,

is not mine only.
All humankind,

women and men,

hungry,

hungry beyond the hunger
for food, for justice,

pick themselves up and stumble on
for this: to transcend barriers, longing

for absolution of each by each,
luxurious unlearning
of lies and fears,

for joy, that throws down the reins
on the neck of
 the divine animal
who carries us through the world.
 - Modulations