This Great Unknowing: Last Poems
Denise Levertov
68 pages, Hardcover
ISBN: 0811214036
ISBN13:
Language: English
Publish: April 1, 1999
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 ‘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.