First edition with personal inscription
LEVERTOV, Denise. Here And Now. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1957.
Small 4to. Original card wrappers, both covers with green template surrounding white cream block with green lettering; pp. [2], 5-32; significant browning and slight white staining to front cover; stains to back cover and rubbed spine; some internal markings from pp. 29-32; otherwise very good.
First edition, with the intimate inscription from the author: "For my dearest Bett with love from Denny, March '57".
"Two girls discover/ the secret of life/ in a sudden line of/ poetry" writes Denise Levertov in her poem "A Secret".
An American poet, essayist 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 stoically refused to be formally aligned to a movement.
Avoiding dramatic metaphorical 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". Levertov 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 1970s 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 fiercely independent master of words.
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