Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

One anxiety of the 20th century was that we would lose the planet, either quickly, through nuclear war, or more slowly by poisoning it with our waste. Denise Levertov was among the foremost to warn us of our danger, through her activism, her poems of protest, but most, through her songs of the earth, where she celebrated life on earth with its physical and spiritual beauty. Her poems have always been songs, prayer-songs, that seem to issue forth of themselves, because every word, every line-ending, feels natural and inevitable. So we are fortunate that there were forty poems still to come when she died, and that their range is so wide, from ‘First Love’, where she celebrates her infant love for the convolvulus flower -

It looked at me, I looked
back, delight
filled me as if
I, not the flower,
were a flower and were brimful of rain.
And there was endlessness.

- to ‘Translucence’ with its intimations of what it means to be resurrected, what it means to be holy -

They know of themselves nothing different
from anyone else. This great unknowing
is part of their holiness. They are always trying
to share out joy as if it were cake or water,
something ordinary, not rare at all

- to ‘Feet’, a long poem in six sequences, which explores the beauty and fragility of human feet through symbols, fairy-tale, personal memory and Christian ritual -

and wash them again and dry them on white,
                                               white towels,
the humble ritual, so ancient, so much an act
                                                of the body...
stirs the heart, as true theatre must, even in an
                                                                age
with so loose or lost a connection to symbolic
                                                             power.

This poems begins with Levertov’s remembering a Neruda ode about celery, “celery the peasant, trudging/ stony Andean ridges to market on poor/ frayed feet”, bringing us to the feet of the poem, the limping iamb, running trochee, cantering dactyl, where she ranges her metre like a hobo hopping trains, bringing it back to celery, as if the poem were a railway loop:

- anyone homeless, who has to keep moving
                                                           all day
with no place to go, even if shelter at night
gives them a chance to bathe their blisters,
                                                    must know
week by week an accretion of weariness, once
                                                     good shoes
grown thin; must know a mounting sense of
                                       frayed and helpless
fiber at the ends of swollen legs, although
                               they have never imagined
the endless foot-after-foot of peasant celery.

It’s the slightly insistent bringing back, this “let me remind you” that wearies me a bit. Committed poems always run this risk, but I think Levertov’s grace of language has avoided it in the past. Perhaps her death came before she had absolutely finished with the poems. But the occasional didactic moment is a small price to pay for them.