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o a poet, although often impelled...
to write poems of pure celebration, is driven inevitably to lament, to anger,
and to expression of dread.” Driven, says Denise Levertov (1923–1997), be-
cause “although we humans are a part of nature ourselves, we have become...
an increasingly destructive element within it, shaking and breaking the ‘great
web’—perhaps irremediably.”
Shortly before she died, Levertov gathered nature poems from her career in
The Life Around Us. “I decided not to group them separately—praise-poems
in one clump, laments and fears in another,” but to let poems in one vein or
the other follow along with “those in which celebration and the fear of loss are
necessarily conjoined. I believe this flux and reflux echo what readers also feel
in their response to ‘the green world ’.”
Join celebration to lament, like the Psalms, as Levertov knew well. Sited at
Stanford where she taught for twelve years, “In California” tests praise with
anger, dawn light “emblazoning” palm and pine with pesticide “poking” at
weeds and moss. Posing “deep oakshadow, airy / shadow of eucalyptus” against
bulldozers, “babel of destructive construction,” she finds a phrase for it all:
“Fragile paradise.”
Who can utter
the poignance of all that is constantly
threatened, invaded, expended,“that witnessing presence”
Life Illumined Around Denise Levertov
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