Candles in Babylon

Candles in Babylon PDF Author: Denise Levertov
Publisher: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Denise Levertov's Candles in Babylon evinces both the inner strength gained by a life of social commitment and the quiet wisdom born of solitude. The seventy-one poems in the book--her first full collection since Life in the Forest (1978)-- are grouped into several thematic sections that explore by turns the subtleties in the shifting balance between our public and private selves, the poet's voice ranging from the wry satire of her "Pig Dreams" sequence to the resonant grandeur of her six-part "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus." Behind it all is the gentle melancholy of the title poem and the poet's vision of peace.

Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov PDF Author: Audrey T. Rodgers
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838634943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Through careful analysis of Levertov's social verse, she demonstrates that there is a consistency and pattern in what the artist herself has termed the "poems of engagement." Denise Levertov began her career in England as a lyric poet in the Romantic mode, but even then was touched by the reductive nature of war, revealed in her first published poem, "Listening to Distant Guns." During the mid-1960s Levertov's social conscience, notably her strong antiwar sentiment, was reawakened by the Vietnam War. This reawakening resulted in several volumes of poetry that mirrored her concerns with the war (and political activism at home) and her perplexity at the nature of human beings - often great and compassionate, but at times cruel and insensitive. There exists a common thread in Levertov's pilgrimage from her beginning as a lyric poet to her status as an artist definitively in the world: she has always responded to everything within the compass of her experience.

A Poet's Revolution

A Poet's Revolution PDF Author: Donna Hollenberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520954785
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
This first full-length biography of Anglo- American poet and activist Denise Levertov (1923-1997) brings to life one of the major voices of the second half of the twentieth century, when American poetry was a powerful influence worldwide. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and interviews with 75 friends of Levertov, as well as on Levertov’s entire opus, Donna Krolik Hollenberg’s authoritative biography captures the full complexity of Levertov as both woman and artist, and the dynamic world she inhabited. She charts Levertov’s early life in England as the daughter of a Russian Hasidic father and a Welsh mother, her experience as a nurse in London during WWII, her marriage to an American after the war, and her move to New York City where she became a major figure in the American poetry scene. The author chronicles Levertov’s role as a passionate social activist in volatile times and her importance as a teacher of writing. Finally, Hollenberg shows how the spiritual dimension of Levertov’s poetry deepened toward the end of her life, so that her final volumes link lyric perception with political and religious commitment.

Making Peace

Making Peace PDF Author: Denise Levertov
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811216401
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
"The poems gathered here span the last three decades of Levertov's life, their subjects ranging from Vietnam to the death-squads of El Salvador to the first Gulf War." -- Back cover. -- Provided by publisher.

Candles Burning

Candles Burning PDF Author: Tabitha King
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440621799
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
“A mix of magic realism and Southern gothic, this stunning collaboration between King and McDowell…moves at a hypnotic pace, like an Alabama water moccasin slipping through black water.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Calliope “Calley” Dakin is no normal little girl. She hears things that maybe a little girl shouldn’t hear—and knows things a little girl should never know. Just seven when her beloved father is tortured, murdered, and dismembered by two women with no discernable motivation, Calley and her mother find themselves caught up in inexplicable events that exile them to Pensacola Beach. There—in a house that’s a dead ringer for Calley’s late great-grandmother’s house—another woman awaits their presence. A woman who understands what Calley is, but can’t begin to imagine just how strong her bond is with her father—even after death... Known for his chilling Blackwater series, author Michael McDowell left behind the unfinished manuscript for Candles Burning on his death in 1999. In the spirit of the ghost stories that Michael loved, Tabitha King has taken up where he left off.

Cold Moon Over Babylon (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

Cold Moon Over Babylon (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) PDF Author: Michael McDowell
Publisher: Bright Sparks
ISBN: 9781941147634
Category : Alabama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy Alabama small town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: fourteen-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law. But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink, graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror ... And beneath the murky surface of the river, a shifting, almost human shape slowly takes form. Night after night it will pursue the murderer. And when the full moon rises over Babylon, it will seek a terrible vengeance ...

Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov PDF Author: Dana Greene
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094212
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Kenneth Rexroth called Denise Levertov (1923–1997) "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, . . . and the most moving." Author of twenty-four volumes of poetry, four books of essays, and several translations, Levertov became a lauded and honored poet. Born in England, she published her first book of poems at age twenty-three, but it was not until she married and came to the United States in 1948 that she found her poetic voice, helped by the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. Shortly before her death in 1997, the woman who claimed no country as home was nominated to be America's poet laureate. Levertov was the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a grand scale. She wanted the persistence of Cézanne and the depth and generosity of Rilke. Once she acclimated herself to America, the dreamy lyric poetry of her early years gave way to the joy and wonder of ordinary life. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, her poems began to engage the issues of her times. Vehement and strident, her poetry of protest was both acclaimed and criticized. The end of both the Vietnam War and her marriage left her mentally fatigued and emotionally fragile, but gradually, over the span of a decade, she emerged with new energy. The crystalline and luminous poetry of her last years stands as final witness to a lifetime of searching for the mystery embedded in life itself. Through all the vagaries of life and art, her response was that of a "primary wonder." In this illuminating biography, Dana Greene examines Levertov's interviews, essays, and self-revelatory poetry to discern the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche, her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and the times in which she lived. Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life is the first complete biography of Levertov, a woman who claimed she did not want a biography, insisting that it was her work that she hoped would endure. And yet she confessed that her poetry in its various forms--lyric, political, natural, and religious--derived from her life experience. Although a substantial body of criticism has established Levertov as a major poet of the later twentieth century, this volume represents the first attempt to set her poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.

Beyond Maximus

Beyond Maximus PDF Author: Anne Day Dewey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804756471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Beyond Maximus shows how field poetics influenced the construction of the public voices of five Black Mountain poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn) in order to explain their association in the 1950s and 60s as well as their break-up as a result of the political and poetic crises of the Vietnam War era.

Transforming Terror

Transforming Terror PDF Author: Karin Lofthus Carrington
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520949455
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This inspired collection offers a new paradigm for moving the world beyond violence as the first, and often only, response to violence. Through essays and poetry, prayers and meditations, Transforming Terror powerfully demonstrates that terrorist violence—defined here as any attack on unarmed civilians—can never be stopped by a return to the thinking that created it. A diverse array of contributors—writers, healers, spiritual and political leaders, scientists, and activists, including Desmond Tutu, Huston Smith, Riane Eisler, Daniel Ellsberg, Amos Oz, Fatema Mernissi, Fritjof Capra, George Lakoff, Mahmoud Darwish, Terry Tempest Williams, and Jack Kornfield—considers how we might transform the conditions that produce terrorist acts and bring true healing to the victims of these acts. Broadly encompassing both the Islamic and Western worlds, the book explores the nature of consciousness and offers a blueprint for change that makes peace possible. From unforgettable firsthand accounts of terrorism, the book draws us into awareness of our ecological and economic interdependence, the need for connectedness, and the innate human capacity for compassion.

"this need to dance / this need to kneel"

Author: Michael P. Murphy
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532677367
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
That Denise Levertov (1923–97) was one of the most pioneering and skilled poets of her generation is beyond dispute. Her masterly use of language, innovative experimentations with organic form, and the political acuity disclosed by her activist poetry are well marked by critical communities. But it is also quite clear that the poems Levertov wrote in the last twenty years of her life, with their more explicit focus on theological themes and subjects, are among the best poems written on religious experience of any century, let alone the twentieth. The collection of essays gathered here shed vital light on this neglected aspect of Levertov studies so as to expand and enrich the scope of critical engagement. In a mixture of theoretical considerations and close readings, these essays provide valuable reflections about the complex relationship between poetry and belief and offer philosophically robust insights into different styles of poetic imagination. The abiding hope is to broaden the terrain for discussions in twenty-first-century theology, literary theory, poetics, and aesthetics—honoring immanence, exploring transcendence, and dwelling with integrity within the spaces between.