LEVERTOV, Denise Here And Now San Fransisco, City Lights Books, 1957
Small 4vo. Cream card wrappers printed in green; specification 'Number Six' issue; Green template on back cover surrounding white cream block with green lettering blurb; wire-stiched binding; pp. [2] 5-32; minor discolouration towards "spine"; otherwise near fine.
First Edition
"Two girls discover/ the secret of life/ in a sudden line of/ poetry" writes Denise Levertov in her poem, 'A Secret'.
An American poet, essaysist and political activist; at the age of 12, Levertov would send a collection of her poems to T.S Eliot who, in turn, would respond with two page positive words of encouragment to a child that had firmly decided her destiny. She would publish her first poem at 17. Here and Now was Denise Levertov's first American collection of poetry and is essential in demonstrating the transformation of her language as influenced by her interest in The Black Mountain Poets and the works of William Carlos Williams although she stoicly refused to be formally aligned to a movement.
Avoiding dramatic metpahorical excess, Levertov employs the lilt of ordinary speech to portray both objects and emotion. In the collection's first poem, 'The Gypsy's Window' she describes the scene as a 'stage' of the ordinary and concludes in her final lines that the roses 'look real/ as unreal/ as real roses'. Lervetrov believed that language was being deployed by government to justify genocide and monstrosity and was deeply involved in the political activism of the Anti-Vietnam movement. She believed it was time for us all to "relearn the alphabet", a phrase that would title her 1970's book. In Modern American Women Poets , biographer Jean Gould labelled Levertov, “a poet of definite political and social consciousness". Throughout her lifetime, and despite her many radical affiliations, Lervetov was steadfast in her refusal to be defined and this scarce first edition marks the starting point of a feircely independent master of words.
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