This Great Unknowing

Rating:
Summary: A fitting memorial
Review: Denise Levertove (1923-1997) was born in London and educated at home. She came to American in 1948 and was introduced to the reading public in "New British Poets", going on to publish more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and translations, as well as enjoying a career as a distinguished university professor. This Great Unknowing is a fitting memorial to her talent as poet and observer of the human condition.

Rating:
Summary: Mahatma Denise
Review: I miss Denise Levertov. I never knew her personally, but she spoke to me through her poetry in ways that few others have. I still remember how stunned I was to hear of her death--several months after the fact, in casual conversation with Deborah Larsen, a great-souled poet in her own right.

I've been rereading during these bleak but beautiful winter months Levertov's posthumous poems. To my mind, they offer some of the best work she ever did. They continue her themes of yearning for something that can't quite be uttered, her love for the particular, her striving to reach a level of awareness before which the heart of being will be revealed, and her concerns for justice and for the environment. But now there's a poignancy, a nostalgia, an anticipation--and perhaps an acceptance--to her verse that suggest a woman awaiting the end. I read her words--her sighs, really--and my soul expands just a little bit more than it would've.

One poem especially touches me--"Memory demands so much." Part of it is a fitting swansong for Levertov:

Take me flying before
you vanish, leaf, before
I have time to remember you,
intent instead on being
in the midst of that flight,
of those unforeseeable words.

Farewell, Denise. And thanks.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent poems in a beautiful book.
Review: This book was my first introduction to the poems of Denise Levertov. I heard about it in an essay written by Kathleen Norris in The Christian Century. The poems are strikingly beautiful and accessible to anyone. Levertov captures our imagination with the depth of her insights and the beauty of her words--not with the obscurity of her images. I have given copies of this to no less than four friends and each of them have bought other copies of her works for themselves. Highly recommended.