This Great Unknowing: Last Poems

When Denise Levertov died on December 20, 1997, she left behind forty finished poems, which now form her last collection, This Great Unknowing. "She will be sorely missed," as Robert Hass remarked in The Washington Post, remembering walking once into a classroom where she had been teaching and seeing "scrawled across the blackboard in her hand these words: 'Accuracy is always the gateway to mystery.' " Few poets have possessed so great a gift or so great a body of work-when she died at 74, she had been a published poet for more than half a century. Although the poems of This Great Unknowing have not been organized with the incredible care Denise Levertov exerted on the more than twenty collections she published with New Directions in her lifetime, the poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers.