To Stay Alive

In her preface, Denise Levertov describes her new collection, To Stay Alive, as "a record of one person's inner/outer experience in America during the '60's and the beginning of the '70's..." Looking back on her years of growing involvement in the Resistance movement, Miss Levertov - the wife of Mitchell Goodman, a codefendant in the Spock trial - has traced recurrent political themes that inform her poetry. Thus To Stay Alive includes relevant work from two earlier volumes, Relearning the Alphabet (1970) and The Sorrow Dance (1967), but is largely new material organized into one long multisectioned poem, entitled "Staying Alive." Read as a whole, the book demonstrates the clarity of a personal vision which has arrived at "the knowledge that opposition to war, whose foul air we have breathed so long by now we are almost choked forever by it, cannot be separated from opposition to the whole system of insane greed, of which war is only the inevitable expression." - Dust jacket.… (more)