Collected Poems by Denise Levertov, edited and annotated by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, with an introduction by Eavan Boland. New Directions, 1,063 pp., $49.95; $39.95 (paper)
Collected Poems by Anne Stevenson. Hexham: Bloodaxe, 560 pp., £25.00 (paper)
“All too often, working poets, in their lifetimes, are seen in fractions,” wrote Eavan Boland in her introduction to Denise Levertov’s poems. “But a Collected Poems is different; it offers a panoramic view.” Two retrospectives offer a panoramic view of very different English-language poets, mostly against the backdrop of the second half of the twentieth century. Levertov’s Collected Poems has just been reissued in paperback (the hardcover was published in 2013); it contains all the poetry she wrote over the course of more than six decades, from juvenilia to her nineteenth collection, published after her death at age seventy-four in 1997. Anne Stevenson’s Collected Poems draws on sixteen collections published from 1965 to 2020, the year of her death at eighty-seven.
Levertov was born in 1923 and Stevenson in 1933; they were roughly of the same generation. Their divergence makes a neat chiasmus: Levertov was British and emigrated to the US in 1948; Stevenson was American and went to England after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1954. (She settled overseas for good in 1964.) How emigration affected these women and their bodies of work offers a study in contrasts, and prompts larger questions about the role of expatriation in women’s poetry in midcentury, when we take into account the fact that Stevenson wrote books about Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop—who also happened to be expats.
Priscilla Denise Levertoff was born just outside London to a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish father who had met in Constantinople, married in England, and spent World War I hunkered down in Leipzig, where her father taught Hebrew and Rabbinics, before settling down for good in Ilford, Essex. Descended from a founder of the Chabad branch of Hasidism, Paul Levertoff converted to Anglicanism and earned his living as a priest in the Church of England. Beatrice Levertoff, née Spooner-Jones, was trained as a teacher and homeschooled her daughters, Olga and Denise. Her curriculum included art, music, and literature, and from
