The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov - Tapa dura

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

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

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.

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.

Denise Levertov was musical, fierce, absolute in her honesty and, for us, her public, as indispensable as any modern poet. To young writers asking for direction, Denise Levertov's name comes to my tongue, always, among the very first of our important forebears. Her work was, and is, a brave gift to us all.--Mary Oliver

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 era there are just a few poets whose work - for its sheer lyric conscience - carries poetry safely into the future. Denise Levertov, as this books shows, is one of them.--Eavan Boland

How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov at last. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov’s Collected Poems presents her marvelous, ground breaking work in full.Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times as “the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.” A staunch antiwar activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers. New Directions is proud to publish this landmark collected poems of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.