Product Description

Anti-war poems by Denise Levertov, a passionate advocate of peace and justice and one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

Denise Levertov achieved recognition as a poet at a young age, winning the admiration of such older poets as T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Though she initially drew a line between her poetic works and her commitment to peace and justice, the Vietnam War inspired a change, and at the time of her death in 1997, she was acclaimed not only for her poetry, but also for her political engagement. Making Peace collects Levertov's finest poems about war and peace, subjects which she addresses with passion and nuance. Spanning the last three decades of her life, their subjects range from Vietnam to the death-squads of El Salvador to the first Gulf War. Often brutally vivid—in "The Certainty" she writes, "war / means blood spilling from living bodies"—Levertov's poems always have at their core her love for humanity, even as she registers her horror at what humans do to one another.

Introduced by Levertov scholar Peggy Rosenthal, these poems mirror the destruction that we witness today, but they also hold within them, as Levertov writes, "a small grain of hope."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1576246 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This gathering of anti-war poems culled from 11 of Levertov's (1923-1997) previous books examines our culpability for "disasters / witnessed but / not suffered in the flesh" in poems about the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race and up through the first war in the Gulf. With the intensity of déjà vu, this slim volume details circumstances uncannily similar to our present situation, and by refuting the notion that war happens elsewhere and to other people, Levertov contends we are so infected by the logic of war, "nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying." To describe the reality of war as we most often experience it-vicariously-Levertov employs the language of television and newspapers, simultaneously describing war's intimate brutality and our distance from it: "'...fifty to seventy/ thousand killed/ in the trenches.'" While readers will face "those foul / dollops of History / each day thrusts at us," throughout the collection, Levertov is as adept at imagining peace as she is at describing war, making this book a galvanizing force for our troubled times and a moving introduction to the work of a major poet.
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Review
A poet of intense emotion and fervid political conviction. -- Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Her poetry touches hearts and long has inspired poetry lovers and other poets. -- Episcopal Life, Lois Sibley

Penetrating...relevant. -- America

About the Author
Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was born in England. Her first book of poems was published in 1946, two years before she came to the U.S. For most of the rest of her life she lived in Somerville, Massachusetts and was closely identified with the Boston area, teaching part of the year at Brandeis and the other part at Stanford University in California. In 1992, she moved to Seattle, Washington. Levertov won the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in poetry, the Lannan Prize, and the 1996 Governor's Writers Award from the Washington State Commission for the Humanities.

Customer Reviews

Food for the spirit
I find Levertov always uplifting. One of my favorite poets. Book useful for sharing.