Denise Levertov

Levertov’s gift for details is matched by the way she can make yearnings and ideas seem almost physical, as if she had them in the palm of her hand.

Her art opens new dimensions of object and situation that but for it we would never have known.

Her imagination is always religiously open, and it always responds to what touches it awake. It is a quick, luminous mind, protected by wisdom…

Levertov continues to be one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention.

At once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan … Levertov has always written a poetry that ranges from the specifically personal to the searchingly mystical.

A touchstone, a maintainer for our generation. Denise Levertov was a constantly defining presence in the world we shared, a remarkable and transforming poet for all of us.

This Great Unknowing … displays the passion, lyrical prowess, and spiritual jubilation that filled Levertov’s final days … [her] last words are honey and fire on the tongue.

Her poems bring joy to the ear and, by their transcendental shimmer, inspire a spiritual hunger.

A purely numinous and transcendent poetry where subject and object seem one and divinely inspired. Long recognized as one of our best and most influential poets, Levertov is nonetheless seriously undervalued.

One of the most vitally innovative of contemporary poets.

Book by book, I have read her poems for their subtle music, for their imagination, for their author’s dignity and integrity and grace; and most of all, for the indomitable and humble spirit that hungers there.

In every time there are just a few poets whose work–for its sheer lyric conscience–carries poetry safely into the future. Denise Levertov, as this book shows, is one of them.

Denise Levertov fulfills the eternal mission of the true Poet: to be a receptacle of Divine Grace and a ‘spendor of that Grace to humanity.’

A poet of intense emotion and fervid political conviction.

I have always admired Denise Levertov’s poetry. Her sparse, sinuous language reminds me of an artist who is able to suggest a face, the entire mystery of a gesture, with a single, uninterrupted pencil stroke.

Denise Levertov has evolved a style of her own, clear, sparse, immediate and vibrant with a very special sensibility and completely feminine insight. She is the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.

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.

Levertov is a poet of flexibility, depth, and imaginative growth. She has become one of those figures around whom a large part of our sense of what has occurred in American poetry in the past fifteen years or so revolves.

Levertov continues to be one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention.

[Denise Levertov] was one of the most defining poets of her generation… She will be missed sorely.

I have savored her poems like salt, like honey.

As in her poetry, Levertov’s descriptions and characterizations can be flawless; her ability to relate an incident is at once timeless and immediate, boundless and searingly personal. ‘These tesserae have no pretensions,’ Levertov notes. She is right–these lovely, lyrical remembrances are too true and spare ever to invite such criticism.