Böcker av Denise Levertov

How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov's Collected Poems presents her marvelous, groundbreaking work in full.Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving." A staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers. New Directions is proud to publish this landmark collected poems of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

For the first time in paperback-Levertov's recent poetry, showing her at the height of her literary powers. Sands of the Well, first published in hardcover in 1996, shows the poet at the height of her considerable powers, as she addresses the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest coastal landscape in terms of music, memory, aging, doubt, and faith.

Denise Levertov's Poems 1960-1967 brings together all of the poetry first published in The Jacob's 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 poet's craft and a widening of her concerns." We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency," she wrote in 1967. Levertov's 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 celebration-"Song for Ishtar," "Come into Animal Presence," " Luxury"-and tolerance for "The Mutes" uttering "those groans men use/passing a woman on the street...to 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 poet's first published story.

At last in a single volume: the breadth and depth of Denise Levertov's poetic achievements. 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 groundbreaking poetrythe 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." Described by Publishers Weekly as "at once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan," Levertov was lauded as "one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention" by The Malahat Review. No poet is more overdue for a single accessible volume; no career could be better to have within easy reach. As a child, Denise Levertov (1923-1997) sent her poems to T. S. Eliot, who admired and encouraged her. Born in England and educated at home, she emigrated to the United States in 1948, and became one of the most important American poets of the second half of the 20th century. Levertov - who won the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prizewas also a staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist. "One of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash), Denise Levertov was an inspiration to generations of writers.

Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays gathers three decades' worth of the poet's most important critical statements. Her subjects are various--poetics, the imagination, politics, spirituality, other writers--and her approach independent minded and richly complex. Here in a single volume are recent essays exploring new ground broken by Levertov in the past decade as well as the finest and most useful prose pieces from The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). This is a book to read and reread. With their combination of sensitivity and practicality, the New & Selected Essays will prove enormously helpful to the writer and reader of poetry. As Kirkus Reviews remarked about her prose: "This is humanism in its true sense--her attitude as evidenced (not described) by her writing is such that the reader cannot help but experience life, at least temporarily, with more intensity, joy, and imagination."

Arranged in seven parts and culminating in the superb "The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich," Breathing the Water draws the readers deep into spiritual domains--not in order to leave the world behind, but to reanimate our sometimes dormant love for it.

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 forces: 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."

This new, comprehensive selection of one of America's foremost modern poets replaces her earlier Bloodaxe Selected Poems (1986), and draws on books published over six decades, with selections from her earlier work and from the six later collections published by Bloodaxe in Britain, from Oblique Prayers to Sands of the Well and This Great Unknowing.