Sands of the Well by Denise Levertov(Bloodaxe £136pp, £8.95 in UK)
Poets, students, readers and her many friends all over the world were deeply saddened to hear of the death of Denise Levertov in Seattle in December last year. Her fine intelligence and sense of humour , her tremendous energy in causes of peace and justice, her exceptionally clear-sighted conception of contemporary poetics and her lifelong commitment to poetry and people, made her very special indeed.
Sands of the Well , with its 102 poems, represents Denise Levertov's mature work. The themes are familiar to the experienced reader: reverence for life, the ecstasy of discovering unexpected beauty in the world around her, the less ecstatic reaction to daily news, the quest for faith. Here as in her previous book: Evening Train, new themes are introduced: the process of ageing, "apprehension of mortality", deeper and more convincing trust in the creator.
It was known that she had a serious illness, though with her friends she made light of it. One is tempted to interpret the image of the tree in her garden in "the Wound" as an image of herself: "My tree had a secret wound./Not lethal. And it was young./But one withered branch/hung down". One thinks also of the metaphor in "Eye Mask", where we can read her doubt about her own readiness: "I need more of the night before I open/Eyes and heart/to illumination. I must still/grow in the dark like a root: not ready, not ready at all."(1992).
Bloodaxe Books have brought out Sands of the Well in a very attractive paperback. Their Selected Poems (1986), judiciously chosen by Cynthia Fuller and Linda Anderson, was a fine cross-section of Denise3 Levertov's work, and Bloodaxe is to be congratulated for publishing the work of one of our greatest contemporary poets who, though born in England, has perhaps been lass recognised on this side of the Atlantic than in America.
In the poems of the present volume, the overall tone is quiet, meditative and trusting. In "Sojourns in the parallel World" the initial tone of armchair philosophy soon gives way to an active appreciation of "cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing, pilgrimage of water, vast stillness: of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane." Some of her early poetry was reminiscent of that of Rene Char in its attention to the language of things. In this poem there is a return to those early preoccupations: "animal voices, mineral hum, wind/conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering of fire to coal.." She was very sensitive, too, to transforming power of what id outside us, in this case that of the parallel, the world of nature: "No one discovers/just where we've been...but we have change, a little."
It has been said that Denise Levertov was the most influential poet of her generation, an that she brought American poetry to the forefront of the international scene. Saying this is to acknowledge that she had developed a language that was accessible to all. She thought about poetry constantly, and her thinking gave rise to many essays on the writing of poetry. She was a fine theoretician, always attuned to the exploratory poetry she called organic form. The qualities of perfect balance and grace, the notion of poetry as dance, rising from the feet, as well as from the depth of her humanity, were a great contribution to 20th-century poetry.
Hers is a poetry of music and silence, of passion and compassion, of "private life and present history", of meditation and social commitment, of contemplative activity and quest for the sacred, of reverence for her own origins and rootedness in the here and now. Her participation in civil rights movements was very intense, particularly in such periods as the campus protests of the sixties.
What comes out with great strength in this volume is Denise Levertov's depth of belief at the end of a journey of doubt and searching.
Maureen Smith is a writer and teacher in based France