San Francisco Poetry

Denise Levertov is probably the best young poet in America today. She strives for technical mastery; she tries to make her poetry musical, she perceives the minute and the macrocosmic aspects of our lives. She makes us aware and she makes us respond.

Miss Levertov's most recent volume of poetry, The Jacob's Ladder, shows a preoccupation with the problem of communication. Not only is this her major theme, but she also sees communication as her primary duty as a poet. Good poetry, she says in "A Common Ground," is

not illusion but Whitman called 'the path

between reality and the soul,' a language

excelling itself to be itself,

speech akin to the light

with which at day's end and day's

renewal, mountains

sing to each other across the cold valleys

Perhaps one mark of the great great poet is the ability to communicate effectively without being literally comprehensible. When Miss Levertov writes, in "Night on Hatchet Cove"

...Out

stove, out lamp, let

night cut the question with profound

unanswer, sustained

echo of our unknowing.

I do not understand her, in the sense that I cannot paraphrase what she is saying. Yet I feel what she is saying, and it is this ability to communicate with music as well as with ideas which makes her poetry outstanding.

The magnum opus of The Jacob's Ladder is "During the Eichman Trial." Its 165 lines view the tragedy of Eichman's life from several perspectives, all of which lead the reader ineluctably to the same realization:

He stands isolate in a bulletproof

witness-stand of glass,

a cage, where we may view

ourselves, an apparition

telling us something he

does not know: we are members

one of another.

She concludes the third and final section of this poem with a reiteration of this message, but in language characterized by a hyper-emotional, almost agonized tone. With metaphor based on the line "Every scream of fear is a white needle freezing the eyes," she writes

...it is Crystal Night

it is Crystal Night

these spikes which are not

pitched in the range of common hearing

whistle through time

smashing the windows of sleep and dream

smashing the windows of history

a whiteness scattering

In hailstones

each a mirror

for many's eyes.

The last poem in the collection provides a striking contrast to "During the Eichman Trial." "A Solitude" dissects a fleeting emotion: the poet sees a blind man, and is overcome with a feeling of "strange joy/to gaze my fill at a stranger's face." It is a remarkable poem, and it illustrates Miss Levertov's talent to perceive and see meaning in the seemingly inconsequential aspects of our lives.

She captures our vague feeling of joy when we approach an animal and he doesn't "quicken his trot" to avoid us; the evanescent feeling of horror when a lover senses the "last traces of warmth.. fading in you"; the complex of emotions she feels when she observes simple scenes like a man walking two dogs on a rainy evening or a young woman wading into a river to draw water.

It is this sort of awakening, which Miss Levertov experiences in almost every aspect of life, that she imparts in her poetry. It makes reading her poetry a rewarding, highly moving discovery.