The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams is the most engaging and lively of literary correspondences - at once a portrait of two geniuses the testimony of their remarkable friendship, and a seedbed of ideas about American poetry. With a 1951 fan letter, the young British poet introduced herself to Williams, and by 1959, Williams is congratulating Levertov on her growth: "this book challenge[s] me so that I am glad I am not younger.... You have not always written so excellently.... I am going to read these first half-dozen poems - maybe more - until as an old man I have penetrated to where your secret is hid." The letters also chronicle their search (individually and together) for a set of formal poetic principles, a search which culminated for Levertov in 1965, when she coined the term "organic form." The warmth, the directness, the flavorsome individuality of the letters - 34 from Levertov and 42 from Williams - increased with their growing intimacy and mutual regard. Always intriguing, their independent-minded letters, which end with the elder poet's death in 1962, have great piquancy and charm. Denise Levertov herself initiated this project, and was then, in the year before her death, "fascinated to read the exchange." This edition also includes the correspondence between Levertov and Williams's widow Florence. Professor Christopher MacGowan, the noted Williams scholar, contributes a superb introduction and informative annotations throughout.

"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). 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.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Poems address the nature of faith, the beauty of nature, the horrors of war, and the pain and tenderness of love

Book by Levertov, Denise

In the sixty poems that comprise The Freeing of the Dust, Denise Levertov continued to explore the personal and public themes that threaded through her work during the disastrous American involvement in Indochina. Relations with family and close friends are depicted with unique poignancy as she pits the at times terrifying concrete image against her vision of the ideal. Here we have poems that speak out of the direct tragedy of war, the result of Ms. Levertov's visit to North Vietnam in the fall of 1972, while others reflect the anguish and the exultation of what she has called the 'inner/outer experience in America during the '60's and the beginning of the '70's.

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

Denise Levertov's poetry has moved ever more deeply into the realm of meditation. Oblique Prayers - published with her first UK Selected Poems - shows her poetry working towards a mature philosophy in harmony with public activism and private reflection. The book also includes her translations of Jean Joubert.

Denise Levertov, American poet and activist, died in December 1997 at the age of 74. This book contains some twenty previously uncollected interviews conducted between the early 1960s and the middle of the 1990s. They are focused primarily on her work as a poet but also on her social and political concerns. The interviews in which Levertov discusses her craft constitute an important document on American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. She talks of her legendary friendship with her mentor William Carlos Williams and her association with the Black Mountain Poets. As she discusses her craft in great detail, she gives special attention to diction, line lengths, versification, and choice of subject matter. Students of American culture and readers of American poetry will be delighted by this collection of the personal views of one of the century's best poets.

As Denise Levertov comments in her brief foreword to The Life Around Us, she has "shared with most poets in every time and place an ardent love of what my eyes and other senses revealed to me in the world we call nature. Yet in this selection of sixty-two poems chosen by the author "celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined." The Life Around Us shows us both the eternal renewal of the natural world and its imperilment: "In these last few decades of the 20th century it has become ever clearer to all thinking people that although we humans are a part of nature ourselves, we have become, in multifarious ways, an increasingly destructive element within it, shaking and breaking 'the great web'--perhaps irremediably."

Using the medium of prose, the contemporary poet expresses her thoughts on the poet's craft and other writers.

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 left off, shows both a refining of the poet's craft and a widening of her concerns.

Conceived as a convenience to those readers who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith. The Stream & The Sapphire presents a compact thematic grouping of thirty-eight poems, originally published in seven separate volumes. The earliest poem here dates from 1978, and though the sequence is not wholly chronological, "it does," as Denise Levertov remarks in her brief Foreword, "to some extent, trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much of doubt and questioning as well as affirmation."

A collection of poems by American poet Denise Levertov.