The career of the late Denise Levertov was marked by an extraordinary fecundity of voice, subject, and expression. To read this slim but cannily assembled Selected Poems is to trace the half-century development of a poetic sensibility that was fearless and wide-ranging to a degree, I think, unmatched by any American poet of the 20th century save, perhaps, Stevens and Lowell. Like De Kooning or Yeats -- like all truly great artists -- Levertov's poetry underwent a long process of transformation, helpfully if somewhat schematically characterized by editor Paul Lacey as having three essential phases: the celebratory, the political, and the religious. That the political poems can seem faintly dated, and that the religious ones are sometimes dull and obvious, seems hardly to matter in the face of the ferocity and streamlined power that her best poems summon. Some of them are such crystalline expressions of feminism, femininity, sex and longing, power and lust -- the "amnesia of the heart," the "silvery now of living alone" -- that I can hardly understand how they have eluded my attention all these long years. Ah well. ( )

Denise Levertov is one of those poets that I appreciate as much for the person she was as I do the poetry she wrote. This collection spans her lifetime and allows the reader to trace the development of her spirituality, in particular (and less so the political activism which I admired). I suppose I would connect with her more if that development had brought her somewhere other than the Catholic Church, but there is a fine sensibility communicated, one that allows you to get past your own spiritual biases and enjoy her vision. For example, "And then once more/ all is eloquent--rain,/ raindrops on branches, pavement brick/ humbly uneven, twigs of storm-stripped hedge revealed/ shining deep scarlet, speckled whistler shabby and/ unconcerned, anything--all/ utters itself, blessedness/ soaks the ground and its wintering seeds." ( )