This generous selection brings news of Levertov’s final achievement. Here we can observe, from poems which span the decades, how this most private artist became a great and abiding public poet. As we read, her superb language and wayward music burn themselves into our minds and memories. In every time there are just a few poets whose work – for ... Read moreits sheer lyric conscience – carries poetry safely into the future. Denise Levertov, as this book shows, is one of them.
Eavan Boland A touchstone, a maintainer for our generation. She was a constantly defining presence in the world we shared, a remarkable and transforming poet for all of us.
Robert Creeley What characterises Denise Levertov’s poetry is an untiring creativity, a freshness and sense of urgency. She wrote lyrical, celebratory poems, and poems that found hard-hitting and appropriate imagery for the horrors of our time. Her work has a wide range, defying the notion that poets can be categorised as “nature poet” and “war poet”. There is a consistent clarity in her voice and a spareness in her language. She was a mystical poet who wrote assertively of the spiritual, and a political poet who continued to find images to make us think.
Cynthia Fuller
The Independent
Levertov’s mastery – 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
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