Dana Greene's biography of Denise Levertov is both a labour of love and a significant work of contextual literary criticism. For the first time I've found that some of Levertov's poetry is dated and placed exactly in the life circumstances she was facing, which makes the biographical details at times harshly revealing of her vulnerability, relational crises, insecurity and yet; which also show us the slow, even late maturing of one whose late poetry became expansive towards that in ordinary life which gives life its mystery, and that which is transcendent which gives that mystery teleological significance.
This was a woman searching for meaning. All her life also a woman hungry for approval yet determinedly independent, disinterested in the claims of traditional faith expressions but moving, perhaps drawn inexorably, towards a vision of God and the world in which her primary concerns for justice and peace, wholeness and purpose, human brokenness as a given and human wholeness as a journey towards rather than a destination reached, all came together in a fusion of horizons. Out of that fusion comes some of her very finest poetry.
Readers of this blog know Levertov is in my canon of writers whose words take with utmost seriousness the role of the poet as the one who enables to see, and as one who believes the imagination is one of the most powerful moral forces of the human mind.
PRIMARY WONDER
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
— Denise Levertov
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