Denise Levertov

Arising out of a devotional and enthusiastic religious movement that swept across most of northern and eastern India in the period from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the powerful and moving lyrics collected and elegantly translated here depict the love of Radha for the god Krishna—a love whose intensity and range of emotions trace the course of all true love between man and woman and between man and God. Intermingling physical and metaphysical imagery, the spiritual yearning for the divine is articulated in the passionate language of intense sensual desire for an irresistible but ultimately unpossessable lover, thus touching a resonant chord in our humanity.

Denise Levertov’s Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 brings under one cover the first published works of a poet who, though born and raised in Great Britain, has long held a distinctive place in postwar American letters. Initiating a major literary undertaking, the volume includes a group of hitherto ungathered poems, selections from Ms. Levertov’s earliest book, The Double Image (1946), published in London, and her three following collections in their entirety: Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960). Living in the United States since the late 1940s, Ms. Levertov has often been associated with the Black Mountain poets, while from the mid- 1960s onward she has been one of the foremost activists in the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements. Yet even in her more “political” poems, her dominant perception has continued to be of the intricate beauty, the mystery of life as it is lived. In announcing Ms. Levertov the winner of the 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Hayden Carruth said of her: “For twenty-five years Denise Levertov has been one of our most prominent poets… Today she is a woman at the crest of her maturity, acute in perceptions, wise in responses, and an artist, moreover, whose technique has kept pace with her personal development.” With Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960, readers have the opportunity of following Ms. Levertov’s remarkable poetic development from its very beginnings.