Levertov, Denise - Robert Mazzocco (essay date 1964)
Robert Mazzocco (essay date 1964)
SOURCE: A review of O Taste and See, in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 111, No. 10, December 31, 1964, pp. 18-19.
[In this excerpt, Mazzocco offers a mixed review of O Taste and See, complaining about the obscurity of many poems in the volume while lauding others for their skilled construction and dramatic appeal.]
At one moment Denise Levertov can be direct and honest and at the next seem struggling as if blind-folded. Looking for meaning in her poems is like looking for a fourleaf clover. She is both sure-handed and sloppy, angular, and sensuous. In general her style is the broken-up mode of Williams—short, straggly lines, with occasionally longer spilling-over ones—but lacking his hard-edged control, the vigor of his observation. Miss Levertov is both more delicate and murkier, aspects at times sadly evident in O Taste and See, where more than once I've had the impression...
[The entire page is 927 words long]
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