[Levertov is a leading post-World War II American poet. Her early verse is often described as neo-Romantic, while her later writing reflects the influence of the objectivist poetry of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound as well as the projectivist work of "Black Mountain" poets Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan. In the following review of "A" 1-12, Levertov expresses high esteem for the volume and defines the strength of Zukofsky's poetry.]

A sense of stress, even of strain—of words spoken out of a necessity that is often painful—words spoken in a low voice that often pauses and then as if recharged resumes in urgency, but still with fastidious deliberation: this, to my ear, is the dominating impression of Louis Zukofsky's poetry.

This quality—the sense of travail—is one reason why he is sometimes hard to read; yet it is his greatest strength, for one cannot but stop and listen, wondering and respectful, to such a voice: the voice of a man of refined, meditative intelligence speaking with intense seriousness.

Zukofsky, who would perhaps have been more at home in eleventh-century Spain than in twentieth-century America, belongs to the tradition of Jewish scholars and thinkers; Spinoza is his spiritual brother. He can bring to his study of Shakespeare (parts of which were published in Black Mountain Review a few years ago) a Talmudist's attention to detail. But as a poet—as a man passionately concerned with the sounds and rhythms words make, or are, as active elements in our lives—he has to turn his mind full on the world he lives in, our world of cars and billboards, T. V., the F.B.I., diners, Brooklyn, the Bronx, wars within wars, the stunted desires and broken beginnings of an unachieved, or transitional, culture, as well as of eternal flowers, birds, wife, child. His is not a temperament to embrace the all with barbaric yawps; so that there's a courage in his doing this—in his submission to being what he must be, a poet. Among his blessings he shows himself austerely selective. The wife and son in his poems are very particularly Celia and Paul, not woman and child. His flower is the modest dark violet, his emblem the cattail, persistent but unobtrusive in its own kind of quiet unfrequented landscape. One has the feeling that he loves a few people, a few things, with deep tenacity, with fervor indeed—and while a sense of being excluded from his concern can sometimes chill the reader, yet this fervor tempers the steel of the poem's measures. And when one comes upon:

that tremendously touching reaching-out of the poet, away from the world of concepts, where he might have remained comfortably enough, into the world of emotions where he is certain to suffer, then one begins to appreciate an apparent coldness for what it is: a beautiful absence of hypocrisy.

William Carlos Williams, in his Note on Zukofsky printed at the end of ["A" 1-12], speaks of another reason why this poetry can be difficult reading; he tells how for years Zukofsky baffled him because he was trying to read him as an Imagist:

Intent on the portrayal of a visual image in a poem my perception has been thrown frequently out of gear. I was looking for the wrong things. The poems whatever else they are are grammatical units intent on making a meaning unrelated to a mere pictorial image.

This is a reminder I find helpful, especially in conjunction with two other phrases in Williams's Note: "… [Z] is a poet devoted to working out by intelligence the intricacies of his craft …" and: "… the musical meaning of the phrase … is paramount." Zukofsky himself (in his prose essay on poetry which follows "A" 1-12 itself) says: "… [The poet's] major aim is not to show himself but that order that of itself can speak to all men." And Williams further says: "And what is the poet so intent on saying? Something to which his care has always been devoted, the spiritual unity of the world of ideas."

In reading Zukofsky, then, we must try to avoid taking the visual image on its face value, or demanding of it a sensuous richness he is rarely concerned to give it; we must try to awaken our own intelligence to follow the intricacy of his thought; and when that fails (as with me, certainly, it often does) we must let the subtle music of his sounds enter us, that is, we must stop trying so hard and see if form itself won't begin, after a while, to present content to us. Are there too many ideas in this poetry? "No ideas but in things", Williams has said—meaning, I think, no ideas left hanging where only the top layer of the intellect can grasp them; i.e., to use ideas as raw material in poetry one must make them sensuously present to the imagination, whether by way of the eye or the ear—any means that will work. Zukofsky's way is by the ear, so that when his musicality fails he falls flat, for me. But he falls, as it were, undaunted: he has exposed himself to that danger and takes the consequences nobly. And it is seldom that his music—austere in melody, beautifully reticulated in counterpoint—does fail him. Nor is he at all times so hard to approach. Sometimes he himself steps very close to the reader, writing a passage as instantly moving as this:

On one of my long walks
Out of Los Angeles
A dog followed my chaps,
For miles.
Maybe their oil-smell
Attracted him;
Four-lane highways
Did not stop him—
A mixed breed—
I couldn't shoo him off.
I walked faster
Trying to keep a distance
Between us,
So the motorists
Wouldn't blame me for him.
I wouldn't touch him
When he caught up.
So he'd run ahead
And look back to make sure
I was following,
And wag his tail.
I couldn't hide from him
So I thought I'd better
Get off the highways,
And when I slowed up to cross
He was hit. But not hurt.
We stalled the traffic
Northbound and southbound.
Then I could not
Resist
Patting him.
Dope, I said,
Why did you do it?
You must be hungry
I'll feed you.
What's good for a dog
I asked at the diner.
'Hamburgers.'
I ordered two huge ones
Well-done.
Do you know
When he saw them
He ran as tho
They were poison.
I never met
That dog again.

That is complete in itself, though in fact it is embedded in the poem. A passage which perhaps is the heart of ["A" 1-12] concerns the poet's father; in these pages tenderness and craft together make a poetry that does what Pasternak (in Dr. Zhivago) has spoken of as an ideal:

… an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; … a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how he assimilated it.

These lines have for me that beautiful transparency:

He sang sometimes, my son,
When we let him talk,
A chance lilt
After prayers—
A shred, a repeated word, his whole world—
As, like Bottom,
You might blunder on tumblesalt
For somersault, Paul.
'They sang this way in deep Russia'
He'd say and carry the notes
Recalling the years
Fly. Where stemmed
The Jew among strangers?
As the hummingbird
Can fly backwards
Also forwards—
How else could it keep going?

Speech moved to sing
To echo the stranger
A tear in an eye
The quick hand wiped off—
Casually:
'I loved to hear them.'

…. .

The miracle of his first job
On the lower East Side:
Six years night watchman
In a men's shop
Where by day he pressed pants
Every crease a blade
The irons weighed
At least twenty pounds
But moved both of them
Six days a week
From six in the morning
To nine, sometimes eleven at night,
Or midnight;
Except Fridays
When he left, enough time before sunset
Margolis begrudged.
His own business,
My father told Margolis,
Is to keep Sabbath.

…. .

A shop bench his bed,
He rose rested at four.
Half the free night
Befriended the mice:
Singing Psalms
As they listened.
A day's meal
A slice of bread
And an apple,
The evenings.
What matter?
His boots shone.
Gone and out of fashion
His beard you stroked, Paul,

…. .

A beard that won over
A jeering Italian
Who wanted to pluck it—
With the love his dark brown eyes
Always found in others.
Everybody loves Reb Pinchos
Because he loves everybody,
How many strangers—
He knew so many—
Said that to me.
Every Sabbath
He took me—
I was a small boy—
To the bird-store window to see
The blue-and-yellow Polly
The cardinal, the
Orchard oriole.

Zukofsky is a master of what to me is the most important skill (if one can call it a skill, it is so largely an instinct); that is, he knows where to break his lines so as to indicate pace and tone. Of his craft in total construction I am less sure. Perhaps the lack is in my own understanding, or perhaps it is because this book was written over a period of many years; but I don't see in it the architectural strength of, say, Paterson. The letters Zukofsky inserts (letters to him from a soldier in the Korean war) though fascinating in themselves—as real voices, sounding from somewhere across nowhere, always are—don't seem to have a real function in the poem's structure. I would say the weakest parts of "A" are those which most resemble Pound—not the magnificent Pound of, for example, Canto LXXXI ("Pull down thy vanity"), but Pound when his juxtapositions remain a patchwork that is excruciatingly hard to see as a whole, an ideogram. I am thinking for instance of parts of sections 6 and 8. Section 7 (which does not sound in the least like Pound) I find impenetrable—something must be hidden in that dense (perverse?) thicket of constricted phrases, but I can't get at it. And section 9, similarly dense, a tightly woven carpet of rhymed metric, has a virtuosity that fails, for me, by obfuscating its content. Then, something that puzzles me is why Zukofsky quotes entire, at the end of his prose essay, as Whitman's "greatest poem", "Respondez". It is a tremendous poem, but what is its relation to what Zukofsky has been saying?

But these objections or doubts are relatively minor—or rather, they are important just because this is an important book—a book one can dig into and not exhaust. What is frustrating in writing about it is to note that it has been published in an edition of only two hundred copies. This is hard to understand. I hope that what I have written here—and much more, what I have quoted—will help to stimulate enough interest in whoever cares for poetry so that author and publisher may be encouraged to put out an edition of more reasonable quantity (and at a lower price). If there are readers for Paterson and the Cantos there must be readers for "A". And how much the many young poets who are living on a diet of public confession, made without care for craft, and therefore being only on the edge of the art of poetry, might learn from Zukofsky of "That order that of itself can speak to all men".