Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967

Denise Levertovs Poems 1960-1967 brings together all of the poetry first published in The Jacobs Ladder (1961), O Taste and See (1964), and The Sorrow Dance (1967). This new compilation, beginning where her Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 (New Directions, 1979) left off, shows both a refining of the poets craft and a widening of her concerns. We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency, she wrote in 1967. Levertovs staunch antiwar stand is reflected here in such poems as Life at War and What Were They Like? with what Kenneth Rexroth called the special luster of a sensibility that never sacrifices humaneness to intensity. Side by side with her poetry of protest is that of celebrationSong for Ishtar, Come into Animal Presence, Luxuryand tolerance for The Mutes uttering those groans men use/passing a woman on the streetto tell her she is female as well as for The Ache of Marriage. Here also are a meditation During the Eichmann Trial, Olga Poems (a sequence in memoriam), and Say the Word, the poets first published story.