Cento poesie tratte dall'opera di Denise Levertov (1923-1997), voce importante del canone poetico nordamericano del secondo Novecento. Una scelta che intende presentare la varietà di forme espressive e tematiche della sua opera, dal registro liricoautobiografico a quello di ispirazione etico-religiosa, dalla testimonianza civile alla riflessione sul lavoro poetico. Connotata fin dall'esordio negli anni Quaranta da una forte impronta filosofica, la poesia di Levertov, ancora poco nota in Italia, si afferma con le raccolte degli anni Sessanta-Settanta, in cui tendono a prevalere la voce pubblica e la testimonianza civile nei confronti della guerra del Vietnam. Nelle ultime raccolte questa voce si attenua a favore di un tema profondo e pervasivo di tutta la sua opera: l'osservazione del mondo naturale e l'empatia con animali, alberi, montagne, laghi, creature viventi e senzienti, sempre più minacciate dall'opera di distruzione dell'uomo. Motivo che rende la sua opera poetica particolarmente vicina alla sensibilità dei lettori del XXI secolo.

How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov at last. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov’s Collected Poems presents her marvelous, ground breaking work in full.

Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times as “the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.” A staunch antiwar activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers.

In 1990, the Swedish Academy awarded Octavio Paz the Nobel Prize in Literature “for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.” Paz is “a writer for the entire world to celebrate” (Chicago Tribune), “the poet-archer who goes straight to the heart and mind, where the center of being is one” (Nadine Gordimer),“the living conscience of his age” (Mario Vargas Llosa), “a poet-prophet, a genius” (Harold Bloom). Here at last is the first retrospective collection of Paz’s poetry to span his entire writing career, from the first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem; the whole is assiduously edited and translated by acclaimed essayist Eliot Weinberger — who has been translating Paz for over forty years — with additional translations by several poet-luminaries. This edition includes many poems that have never been translated into English before, new translations based on Paz’s final revisions, and a brilliant capsule biography of Paz by Weinberger, as well as notes on the poems in Paz’s own words, taken from various interviews he gave throughout his life.

Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of her writing life, The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov offers a chronological overview of her great body of work. It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her ground-breaking poetry-the work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature."

Described by Publishers Weekly as "at once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan," Levertov was lauded as "one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention" by The Malahat Review. No poet is more overdue for a single accessible volume; no career could be better to have within easy reach.

Three of Denise Levertov's classic volumes, now available in a single edition. Here gathered for the first time in a single edition are three of Denise Levertov's finest books: The Freeing of the Dust (1975), Life in the Forest (1978), and Candles in Babylon (1982). This new compilationbeginning where Denise Levertov's Poems 1968-1972 left offtestifies not only to Levertov's technical mastery, but also to her spiritual vision, especially in regard to the Vietnam War. Some of Levertov's best war poems, the result of her visit to North Vietnam in 1972, are contained in this marvelous collection. Poems 1972-1982 enables readers to observe a crucial phase in Levertov's poetic development. At the same time, it illuminates Robert Creeley's assessment that she "was a constantly defining presence in the world we shared, a remarkable and transforming poet for all of us."

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. The poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers.

Yet in this selection of sixty-two poems chosen by the author “celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined.” The Life Around Us shows us both the eternal renewal of the natural world and its imperilment: "In these last few decades of the 20th century it has become ever clearer to all thinking people that although we humans are a part of nature ourselves, we have become, in multifarious ways, an increasingly destructive element within it, shaking and breaking 'the great web'––perhaps irremediably.”

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Tesserae, the small individual pieces of glass or stone that make up a mosaic, is an apt title for this series of memoirs by Denise Levertov.

Rather than a completed autobiography, these collected memoirs are, for the author, fragments "composed from time to time between poems." Each of the twenty-seven pieces of Tesserae explores a memory vital to Levertov's life; each is complete in itself and set here chronologically. And, as in any good mosaic, every piece reflects light at different angles, giving this self-portrait its living complexity. Tesserae differs for the first time the unique memoirs or "a poet who may just be the finest writing in English today" (Kirkus Reviews).

Poems address the nature of faith, the beauty of nature, the horrors of war, and the pain and tenderness of love

Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays gathers three decades' worth of the poet's most important critical statements. Her subjects are various––poetics, the imagination, politics, spirituality, other writers––and her approach independent minded and richly complex. Here in a single volume are recent essays exploring new ground broken by Levertov in the past decade as well as the finest and most useful prose pieces from The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). This is a book to read and reread. With their combination of sensitivity and practicality, the New & Selected Essays will prove enormously helpful to the writer and reader of poetry. As Kirkus Reviews remarked about her prose: "This is humanism in its true sense––her attitude as evidenced (not described) by her writing is such that the reader cannot help but experience life, at least temporarily, with more intensity, joy, and imagination."

Verse celebrating natural beauty and intricacy are collected with poems devoted to social issues in a gathering of Levertov's earlier writings from England and New York City