This Great Unknowing: Last Poems - Hardcover

Levertov, Denise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811214036 ISBN 13: 9780811214032

Publisher: New Directions, 1999

Synopsis

When Denise Levertov died on December 20, 1997, she left behind forty finished poems, which now form her last collection, This Great Unknowing. "She will be sorely missed," as Robert Hass remarked in The Washington Post, remembering walking once into a classroom where she had been teaching and seeing "scrawled across the blackboard in her hand these words: 'Accuracy is always the gateway to mystery.' " Few poets have possessed so great a gift or so great a body of work-when she died at 74, she had been a published poet for more than half a century. Although the poems of This Great Unknowing have not been organized with the incredible care Denise Levertov exerted on the more than twenty collections she published with New Directions in her lifetime, the poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers.

About this title

From the Publisher

Publishers Weekly March 29, 1999
At once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan-two Black Mountain poets with whom she is often associated Levertov has always written a poetry that ranges from the specifically personal to the searchingly mystical. When writing here in a less self-consciously ecstatic mode, "beyond the/known geography, beyond familiar/inward, outward, inward," she appproaches the complexities of her best work, as in the volume Breathing the Water. Movingly, even in this final book, Levertov's work is tinged with estrangement. The heightened diction is entirely appropriate, rising to equal the splendor of Levertov's humane vision, which remains.

About the Author

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was a British born American poet. She wrote and published 20 books of poetry, criticism, translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honors, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811214036
• ISBN 13: 9780811214032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 68