Over the years, Denise Levertov's poetry has moved ever more deeply into the realm of meditation, while yet speaking with the familiar voice of "the poet in the world." Oblique Prayers is arranged in four thematic sections that, taken together, work toward a mature philosophy in equal harmony with public activism and private reflection. A personal mood links the poems of “Decipherings.” In “Prisoners," the poet addresses the continuing horrors of our dark time: genocide, imperialism, impending nuclear holocaust––human degradation in brutal political guise. Levertov is an accomplished translator. With "Fourteen Poems by Jean Joubert," she introduces English-speaking readers to a contemporary French poet whose work is remarkably akin to her own. "Of God and of the Gods," the final section of the book, is informed by a transcendent lyricism that can equate in a breath "a day of spring, a needle's eye."

Over the years, Denise Levertov's poetry has moved ever more deeply into the realm of meditation, while yet speaking with the familiar voice of "the poet in the world."

"Levertov's master--more than mastery, because she is one of the originators--of contemporary poetic form, informed with a fierce, generous intelligence, can be frightening." --Ursula Le Guin, Washington Post

Poems address such topics as paintings, music, landscapes, and the terror in El Salvador.

The landmark collected work of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, now in paperback.

When Denise Levertov died on December 20, 1997, she left behind forty finished poems, which now form her last collection, This Great Unknowing. Few poets have possessed so great a gift or so great a body of work—when she died at 74, she had been a published poet for more than half a century. The poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers.

Conceived as a convenience to those readers concerned with doubt and faith, Denise Levertov's 34 selected poems originally were published in seven separate volumes. The poet presents a selection of thirty-four of her own poems culled from previously published volumes, tracing her movement from agnosticism to Christian faith and her oscillation from doubt to affirmation along the way.

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). 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.

Now available. Here are the early poems which first brought Denise Levertov's work to prominence -- from early uncollected poems, selections from The Double Image (London, 1946), and her three books Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958) and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960), which established her as one of the more lyrical and most influential poets of the New American poetry.