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PARTISAN REVIEW
Make No Bones
THIS GREAT UNKNOWING: LAST POEMS. By Denise Levertov.
New Directions. $9.95.
THE NICHE NARROWS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Samuel Menashe.
With a Preface by Dana Gioia. Talisman House. $16.95
SOON AFTER THE EXPATRIATE POET Denise Levertov, who died in 1997,
arrived in America, she came under the influence of William Carlos
Williams, and this caused her to change her manner. She regarded his
influence as a liberation; and indeed, superficially anyway, her style has
a strong resemblance to his. One could, not impossibly, suppose that it
is he who is writing:
"Convolvulus" said my mother.
Pale shell-pink, a chalice
no wider than a silver sixpence.
It looked at me, I looked
back, delight
filled me as if
I, not the flower,
were a flower and were brimful of rain.
It
has the characteristic wayward but step-by-step march of his versi–
fication, a prosody eschewing not only rhyme but rhythm, which would
entail repetition and fulfilled expectation.
Nevertheless, to compare Levertov with Williams is not kind to her.
For his versification is the expression of a very particular vision. Each
line, each step in the march, seems to some degree to be a separate state–
ment or proposition, surrounded by a zone of silence. It is as if, line by
line, the world were being rediscovered. Levertov has her own vision,
but it is not this; and accordingly the perennial
enjambement
in her
verse, does not seem to serve any very definite expressive purpose.
Fully occupied with growing-that's
the amaryllis. Growing especially
at night: it would take
only a bit more patience than I've got
to
sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
