Jump directly to the Content
Jump directly to the content
Article
The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov
The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
New Directions, 2013
960 pp., 49.95

Buy Now

Brett Foster


"That Long Short-Cut"

Denise Levertov's way home.

IMAGE journal's selection of Scott Cairns for the eleventh annual Denise Levertov Award is not only a fitting bestowing for its own sake but also one more sign of the persistence of Levertov's reputation in the area of religion and literature. Her poetry continues to be relevant—not least because it remains for some so ripe for critical debate—and her legacy as a poet of faith and, what's more, as a significant figure in 20th-century American poetry generally, shows no signs of abating. Indeed, that is an over-mild way of putting it: in recent years, Levertov is enjoying a biographical and editorial attention rare for any poet, of whatever stature and despite (we might feel) her identification as a Christian poet. She has been the subject of a pair of biographies in the past two years, Dana Greene's Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life and Donna Hollenberg's A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, and my own unscientific survey among fellow poetry teachers suggests that her writing receives university curricular attention as well. Most centrally, though, the publication last year of The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov now allows us to consider Levertov's development and achievement in fuller fashion. It will also give longtime readers a fresh occasion to consider the different phases in this prolific poet's career, and to revisit questions about the nature and quality of those different phases.

Nineteen individual volumes of poetry, whose publication dates range from 1946 to 1999, are included in this edition, and the editors' first service is a strictly functional one—these many stray books are now conveniently bound, and notes at the back provide helpful textual and critical information. I realize this risks stating the obvious—praising a collected edition for collecting an author's writing is a bit like praising water for being wet—but for even serious poetry readers, Levertov is one of those poets whose body of writing has always been difficult to grasp in its entirety. Those many skinny New Directions volumes seem to blend together and proliferate like so many lyrical, excitable rabbits. (John Ashbery is today's example of such a poet, whose many books may similarly overwhelm readers wishing to get a sense of his long, productive career.)

As useful and welcomed as this new Levertov edition is, then, it should also be said that any collected volume of this length and heft (a tidy 1,063 pages, resembling a college student's desk thesaurus) may not be the best book for readers wishing to gain a first impression or compressed recollection of Levertov's poetry. (That said, be sure not to overlook the page after page 1063, which invites readers to a New Directions website featuring 25 audio recordings of Levertov reading her poems—a veritable internet treasure for fans of this poet.) For starters, various selected editions may be preferable, including Selected Poems (2003), with an important introduction by Robert Creeley, or prior collections of early or last poems. Books & Culture readers may find especially interesting The Stream and the Sapphire (1997), a lovely little volume, just about the perfect size for a coat pocket, and subtitled "Selected Poems on Religious Themes." The 38 poems gathered here "trace my own slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith," Levertov writes in a foreword; the collection, she adds, is meant "as a convenience for those readers who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith."

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, then, may find its most suited audience amid the poet's most committed readers. Nevertheless, Eavan Boland's is a model introduction to Levertov, her poetry, her poetic journey, and the evolution of her literary reputation, all of which is covered concisely in seven pages.

Boland is an Irish poet who first met Levertov in Dublin, she tells us, thirty years ago, and she is also a professor at Stanford, where Levertov once taught as well. Boland begins her comments on what Levertov herself called the "borderlands" of her background, as the daughter of a Welsh mother and a Russian Hasidic father who moved to England and became an Anglican priest in Essex. In her autobiographical prose collection Tesserae, Levertov herself evokes this heritage memorably in the short piece "Inheritance," where she tells how her mother, when five years old in 1890, visited an "ancient great-uncle" in North Wales. Every bit the Welsh bard—"He had a long white beard, and wore knee-britches"—this uncle spoke of seeing Napoleon, "Boney himself," on horseback at the Battle of Waterloo. The story makes the narrator, now "living in the age of jets and nukes," marvel at the relative closeness of history. Levertov grew up, Boland explains, in an English poetic era of "rhetoric and incantation," the moment of Dylan Thomas and George Barker, a context that would lend itself to the music beneath the "conversational ease" of Levertov's poems.

Helpfully Boland divides Levertov's career into three seasons. In her early books, from 1946 to The Jacob's Ladder (1961), Levertov was "trying her notes." Beginning with O Taste and See, a transitional book, Levertov left behind a lyric privacy for a more public voice that, in the early Sixties, was shortly preceding the events that defined the decade. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement shaped Levertov's public persona of protest. She found common ground with poets such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lord, and Lucille Clifton, whose own recent tome of collected poetry represents a similar page-by-page feast for poetry lovers. This middle period comprised seven collections, from The Sorrow Dance (1967) to Candles in Babylon (1982). Levertov would speak unapologetically about her "didactic poetry," and wrote a kind of manifesto of "total involvement" in her well-known 1967 essay "The Poet in the World."

Boland acknowledges that these middle-career poems "remain a controversial part of her achievement," and that some readers felt a "keen disappointment at the loss of their earlier lyric witness." Levertov's stance certainly compromised her with some devotees of religious poetry, the very audience that today arguably hold her in the highest esteem. For example, Chad Walsh, in his essay in the distinctly evangelical essay collection The Christian Imagination, bemoaned various presences in modern poetry, including Denise Levertov, a "propagandist for the peace movement." This view overlooks, I think, the striking presence of Levertov's Anglican heritage even in these poems of her "pre-conversion" phase. Consider a few titles: "Advent 1966," "Tenebrae" (with epigraph "Fall of 1967"), and "Psalm: People Power at the Die-in," where the protesting poet assumes the mantle of the Old Testament prophet, crying out against a wayward Israelite nation at war, and exhorting a counter-culture to rise above the age's growing political pessimism: "Over our scattered tents by night / lightning and thunder called to us."

In similar fashion, Boland rejects here the common notion that Levertov's lyrical powers vanished during this middle period, but argues instead that this collected edition allows readers to see a "continuance rather than rupture." Nothing is lost: "We turn a page; we turn another … . And we can prove that continuance."

Levertov's last fifteen years marked a third and final season, characterized by what Boland calls a "fully realized moral vision" and many would call a late, religious phase, following Levertov's conversion in 1984, first as an Anglican and eventually as a Catholic. This last period spanned six volumes of poems, from Oblique Prayers (1984) to the posthumous The Great Unknowing.

Incidentally, Levertov's late Catholic years were spent in Washington, which is one reason the Seattle-based IMAGE journal honors her with its literary prize. Likewise, Boland and other Stanford professors are some of her most ardently supportive readers and critics and editors, and its Green Library houses many of her manuscripts and letters. I mention all of this to say simply that it is a credit to any writer, to any human, when those places where her or his life was spent become abiding sites of honor when the writer is no longer with us.

All in all, Levertov's was quite a life and poetic record. I think of her description in "Overland to the Islands" of a dog that is "Intently haphazard," or, elsewhere, "that long short-cut." Or maybe a phrase from "Jacob's Ladder" summarizes this collected edition well: "A stairway of sharp / angles solidly built." This new collection, Boland suggests, will be an occasion for rereading and reinterpretation.

Levertov died in 1997, and Boland concludes her introduction by recalling a small memorial service at Stanford for this poet and former professor. Adrienne Rich delivered the eulogy, in which she remembered talking at the kitchen table with Levertov when both were young mothers and poets in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I happened to be at that memorial service and even had the high honor of participating in it, along with the other poetry fellows there at the time. I think back to my two years in the writing program at Stanford and instantly frame it as a time of frequently memorable readings, lectures, and visits. Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds, and Robert Creeley gave Lane Lectures. Carolyn Kizer and David Ferry visited classes, and the professor of modernism and avant-garde poetics, Marjorie Perloff, hosted authors such as Kathleen Fraser and Charles Bernstein. Yet nothing was as memorable or as special as taking part in Denise Levertov's memorial service. In lower moments, the young poets twittered (though this was pre-Twitter) about Adrienne Rich being present; she was noticeably frail, but as vigorous as we all expected her to be. In our higher moments, the young poets read Levertov's poems with great solemnity, realizing what had been entrusted to them on this occasion. I read "Primary Wonder," and to this day I have never felt, when reading another's poem out loud (which I try to do as often as I can), the same sense of being a glad supplicant in service to another poet and poem. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

There is so very much in this new edition to discover or rediscover. I had not read Levertov's earlier poetry in ages, and was surprised by how much of interest are in these opening pages, from the clear Yeatsian imprint of "Two Voices" ("What can I give you? I am the unseizable / indigo and wandering sea") to the side-by-side versions of "An Innocent," the second being greatly compressed in revision. In "The Innocent," we hear an early defense of nature; the cat batting the mouse "is innocent / having no image of pain in him" whereas for us, "How cruel the cat is to our guilty eyes." And in poem a few books later:

The cat is eating the roses:
that's the way he is.
Don't stop him, don't stop
the world going round,
that's the way things are. ("The Sage")

Many poems here are lush in their physical descriptions (see "Sunday Afternoon"). These early poems also feature an already seasoned expression of domestic life, as in "The Marriage": "The force / of your commitment charges us—we live / in the sweep of it, taking courage one from the other."

Later, when re-reading the increasingly God-inflected writing in Levertov's later books, I was struck again by these poems of intensifying spiritual outlook and achieved religious faith, poems flush with a sense of arrival, at last, and yet humbled by the very destination. I thought at one point about the novelist Thomas Wolfe's late letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins, the last letter Wolfe would ever write: "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country," he says. He describes seeing death very close (Wolfe was writing on August 12, 1938, and would die a little more than a month later), and though he is not afraid, he still feels mortality cling to him, and feels a desperate wish to live: "—and I know now I'm just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can't explain, I know I am a deeper and a wiser one."

That presence of wisdom and of openness, a trait that lovers of Levertov are usually quick to mention, of humility and kinship (that latter word one that she cherished in Julian of Norwich's Showings), is in full evidence in Levertov's late religious poems. Like the "long voyager" that Wolfe imagines himself to be, Levertov, too, was, in the editors' words in an "Afterword" that nicely complements Boland's introduction, a "lifelong pilgrim and seeker for spiritual meaning." Levertov writes in "The Beginning of Wisdom," from Sands of the Well (1996),

I am so small, a speck of dust
moving across the huge world. The world
a speck of dust in the universe

Are you holding
the universe? You hold
onto my smallness. How do you grasp it,
how does it not slip away?

I know so little.

You have brought me so far.

These lines, even in their questioning mode, offer praise to the immense Benignity that makes possible our creatureliness, and sustains the created world in which we subsist. In "Primal Speech," a poem earlier in the same collection, Levertov professes her awe at the natural world, an emphasis present in her very first, neo-Romantic poems from the 1940s. For her, creation's manifold inhabitants, everything that's living, evince "the affirmation even before the naming." And yet the naming, too, is essential, and is the poet's special privilege, her ticket in, as when the title character in Levertov's poem "Caedmon," the first Christian poet in English, describes the inspiring angel that brings forth a famous hymn: "and nothing was burning, / nothing but I, as that hand of fire / touched my lips and scorched my tongue / and pulled my voice / into the ring of the dance."

Readers of this collected edition will find "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus" in its entirety, whereas The Stream & the Sapphire includes only its sixth and final section, "Agnus Dei." This poem's composition was a crucial step in Levertov's eventual conversion; she said that she was an agnostic when she began the poem and a Christian by the time she completed the "Mass," an irony to be savored when we consider the poem's subject is doubting Thomas.

"In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being" possesses a refreshing quality that acts as a ballast to Levertov's yearnings for the transcendent—her insistence on the individual, her prioritizing of the individual's experiences, and responsibilities, in his or her own singular living. "Birds afloat in air's current, / sacred breath? No, not breath of God, / … / It's we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred, / leaves astir, our wings / rising, ruffled—but only the saints / take flight. / … / we inhale, exhale, inhale, / encompassed, encompassed." And as for her, so for us all: we writers of faith sometimes require a necessary mistrust of the experiential platitude, concealed behind a tireless wish to honor the "hallowed," the "holy," the "mysterious," etc., and marked by a trigger-finger quickness to label such experience as "incarnational" or "sacramental." Don't misunderstand me: genuine versions of religious encounter or merely elevated experience do grace our lives, and poetry has unique powers to apprehend and record them. Yet not every hummingbird at the feeder does an incandescent tongue of fire make. Levertov's resistance here is instructive, and a deep part of her personality is on display here: the writer who began one of her first published poems, "So you, too, are a part of me," a confident, almost Whitmanian acknowledgment by a poet setting out that the mansion of the self has many chambers, many occupants with eclectic voices, and also the writer who once remarked that she always—always— wrote from what was happening in her life.

In light of this last poem and that last remark, it is especially fitting to see Scott Cairns honored as this year's Levertov Prize recipient. He too, often with a healthy dryness and suspicion (and self-suspicion most of all) that strengthens rather than limits his poetry, seems to suspect that the living we do in this world appertains—"For near is where you'll meet what you have wandered / far to find. And near is where you'll very likely see / how far the near obtains." This opening proposition from Cairns' poem "Draw Near" is not at the expense of the sacramental. No, far from it, since immediately we are introduced to the setting of the "dark katholikon," possibly on Mt. Athos, whose candles convey "a more than common sense of what lay flickering / just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely / swoon just shy of apprehension." The poem ends with a lovely turn toward hermeneutic modesty that is consistent with Levertov's:

I have no sense of what this means to you, so little
sense of what to make it of it myself, save one lit glimpse
of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.

It is good to see Cairns, a great lover of Greece, brooding like Levertov before him on that phrase from St. Paul's address to the Athenians. Like the apostle, never more memorably than in Acts 17, Levertov and Cairns quote poets and are poets, showing a Pauline willingness to engage and a knack for cagey persuasions. And the rest of us said, in our best King Jamesian voices, "We will hear thee again of this matter."

Brett Foster is the author of two poetry collections, The Garbage Eater (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press) and Fall Run Road, which was awarded Finishing Line Press's Open Chapbook Prize. His writing has lately appeared in the Anglican Theological Review, IMAGE, Kenyon Review, The New Criterion, and Yale Review. A teacher of creative writing and Renaissance literature at Wheaton College, in 2014-15 he will be a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Azusa Pacific University.

Most ReadMost Shared