Making Peace: Poetry (New Directions Bibelot) - Softcover

Denise Levertov; Peggy Rosenthal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216403 ISBN 13: 9780811216401

Publisher: New Directions, 2006

Synopsis

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 vividin "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."

About this title

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.

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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Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0811216403
• ISBN 13: 9780811216401
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64