[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 of reading notations, messages, or cryptograms to the Inner Self. Her best poems, none of which are in this volume, appear to be existing purely by chance, quirky miracles as it were (e.g., "Goddess," "Pleasures," "Third Dimension," "Hands").

Her sensibility is towards the lyrical, with an undercurrent of the gnomic (there are also relations re Zen, Jewish mysticism, and indeterminacy, all too spidery to go into here). She writes about nature or the everyday occurrence, the hot and cold flashes of experience, which are, to use Klee's phrase, "secretly perceived"—"the known," as Miss Levertov says, suddenly "appearing fully itself and / more itself than one knew." Her effects depend largely on the naturalness of delivery, the unpremeditated way an insight may be formed, as if the reader and the poet were discovering it at the same time. The dangers are obvious: when spontaneity gets cramped, one's left with a little tangle of associations, weeds choking flowers. She is, I believe, a difficult poet to judge. "The Crack" is typical of the shorter pieces in her book:

Unless one wishes to be indulgent, I think it can be agreed that nothing symbolic is involved, merely a stray feeling, an apprehension. The snow motif is neatly done, but it's essentially commonplace, an introductory setting. The spring night wearing a Russian shirt is a startling phrase (or idea) but only so because of its oddity. What it evidently refers to is the silken air of spring, certainly a cliché. Or is the "Russian" somehow connected to the snow and thus supposed to make it more original? Or is the "Russian" autobiographical? In "Love Song" we have this: "A long beauty, what is that? / A song / that can be sung over and over, / long notes or long bones," followed by "Love is a landscape the long mountains / define but don't / shut off from the / unseeable distance." If the distance can't be seen, what does it matter what the mountains do? Or is "unseeable" meant to suggest that the essence of love is mystery? Another cliché. These passages could just as well be prose; actually they are prose. Nor do I understand what is gained by the stretchedout strategy of "The Ground Mist," here in part:

The question proper is in the first and last phrases; the rest is just filler, with all its s's and portentous blanks. It is I suppose related to Olson's "Projective Verse" essay, where he says "that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath." Well, it is certainly longwinded and the sound is comparable. Now for the title-poem, which usually in any collection signifies something important:

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

What of importance is going on? I confess I cannot find it. The first statement turns Wordsworth on his head. The remainder, aside from "the imagination's tongue," is alternately jerky, quaint, or banal, quasi-parabolic sentimentalism. And "transform into our flesh our deaths"—such an abstraction for a poem apparently celebrating immediacy!

Fortunately, Miss Levertov has solid stuff as well. "Losing Track" is a taut, sparkling construction; "Grey Sparrow" and "Overheard" have a quiet loveliness. Then there are her darker poems, more disciplined and dramatic, and more moving by far. They are full of domestic chills and fevers, the face in the mirror "shot with the foreknowledge of / dread and sweat," contemporaneity "choking under a / mushroom cloud in the year of the roach," or outright contempt: "Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak / of our own doubts, while dubiously / we mother man in his doubt!" All these poems are interconnected through the incidental use of narrative mosaics, stripped-down confessionals—a tendency perhaps to be further explored, and not only in verse, for included here is Miss Levertov's first published short story. Concerning a woman, her son and husband, the felling of a poplar, and "the precariousness of happiness," it is a warm, ruminative epiphany.