This Great Unknowing: Last Poems - Hardcover

Levertov, Denise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811214036 ISBN 13: 9780811214032

Publisher: New Directions, 1999

Synopsis

When Denise Levertov died on December 20, 1997, she left behind forty finished poems, which now form her last collection, This Great Unknowing. "She will be sorely missed," as Robert Hass remarked in The Washington Post, remembering walking once into a classroom where she had been teaching and seeing "scrawled across the blackboard in her hand these words: 'Accuracy is always the gateway to mystery.' " Few poets have possessed so great a gift or so great a body of work-when she died at 74, she had been a published poet for more than half a century. Although the poems of This Great Unknowing have not been organized with the incredible care Denise Levertov exerted on the more than twenty collections she published with New Directions in her lifetime, the poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers.

About this title

Reviews

Levertov died in 1997. She did not entirely organize her book, but she must certainly have been aware, being so ill that the poems she was writing would be among her "last". The book's title, taken from the poem quoted above, was certainly a felicitous choice. Throughout the book there is a sense of endings, as well as a faith that such endings lead only to other belongings. This Great Unknowing contains nothing unfamiliar to readers accustomed to Levertov's work. There is the characteristic freshness of tone (and the occasional unconquered sentimentality) and Levertov's characteristic celebration of nature, with "every prodigy of green" " wholly at odds/with the claims of reasonable gloom." There may be a "great unknowing" but there is also a certainty in the attractiveness of Levertov's poetry.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811214036
• ISBN 13: 9780811214032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 68