Wednesday, November 08, 2023

Reading Denise Levertov for three-and-a-half years

On 25 May 2020, I posted a quote from Denise Levertov's poem "Listening to Distant Guns", the first of the "early and uncollected poems" in "The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov": "That low pulsation in the east is war." As I'd previously done with Paul Celan and John Ashbery, I've since quoted one Levertov poem a day. and today I posted this from the last poem in her posthumous collection "This Great Unknowing": "When I opened the door / I found the vine leaves / speaking among themselves in abundant / whispers." It's been a joy to follow Levertov's attention to the world's "abundant whispers", whether natural, social, religious, or political. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 November 2023)

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