How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov’s Collected Poems presents her marvelous, groundbreaking work in full. Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as “the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.” A staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers. New Directions is proud to publish this landmark collected poems of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets.

How do women writers cope with changes and juggle the demands in their already full lives to make time for their lives as artists? In this anthology, noted female novelists, journalists, essayists, poets, and nonfiction writers address the old and new challenges of "doing it all" that face women writers as the twenty-first century approaches. With eloquence, sensitivity, and more than a touch of wry humor, Sleeping with One Eye Open relates positive stories from women who lead effective lives as artists, emphasizing how sources of inspiration, discipline, resourcefulness, and determination help them succeed despite the obstacle of "no time.

Conceived as a convenience to those readers concerned with doubt and faith, Denise Levertov's 34 selected poems originally were published in seven separate volumes. The earliest dates from 1978, and the group together more or less traces Levertov's slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith.

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. The poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers.

Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of her writing life, The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov offers a chronological overview of her great body of work. It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her ground-breaking poetry-the work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature." Described by Publishers Weekly as "at once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan," Levertov was lauded as "one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention" by The Malahat Review. No poet is more overdue for a single accessible volume; no career could be better to have within easy reach.

Here is the good stuff: poetry written by women that actually excites the thinking reader. This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers' notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing? This groundbreaking anthology includes some of our most powerful women writers-among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Gluck. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes. At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry-its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.

This new, comprehensive selection of one of America's foremost modern poets draws on two dozen collections published over six decades. Edited by Paul A. Lacey, it replaces her earlier Bloodaxe Selected Poems (1986), and includes selections from both her earlier work and from the six later collections published by Bloodaxe in Britain, from Oblique Prayers to the posthumously published Sands of the Well and This Great Unknowing. Preface by Robert Creeley.

Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz is incontestably Latin America's foremost living poet. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol) here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger made its appearance. This is followed by the complete texts of Days and Occasions (Dias Habiles), Homage and Desecrations (Homenaje y Profanaciones), Salamander (Salamandra), Solo for Two Voices (Solo a Dos Voces), East Slope (Ladera Este), Toward the Beginning (Hacza el Comienzo), Blanco, Topoems (Topoemas), Return (Vuelta), A Draft of Shadows (Pasado en Claro), Airborn (Hijos del Aire), and Paz's most recent collection, A Tree Within (Arbol Adentro). With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, John Frederick Nims, and Charles Tomlinson."

The Poems of Octavio Paz is the first retrospective collection of Paz's poetry to span his entire writing career from his first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem. This landmark bilingual edition contains many poems that have never been translated into English before, plus new translations based on Paz's final revisions. Assiduously edited by Eliot Weinberger-who has been translating Paz for over forty years-The Poems of Octavio Paz also includes translations by the poet-luminaries Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson. Readers will also find Weinberger's capsule biography of Paz, as well as notes on many poems in Paz's own words, taken from various interviews he gave throughout his long and singular life.

Denise Levertov's Candles in Babylon evinces both the inner strength gained by a life of social commitment and the quiet wisdom born of solitude. The seventy-one poems in the book--her first full collection since Life in the Forest (1978)-- are grouped into several thematic sections that explore by turns the subtleties in the shifting balance between our public and private selves, the poet's voice ranging from the wry satire of her "Pig Dreams" sequence to the resonant grandeur of her six-part "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus." Behind it all is the gentle melancholy of the title poem and the poet's vision of peace.

This bilingual collection of Eugene Guillevic's work, chosen from six of his books published between 1942 and 1966, and translated by the poet Denise Levertov, introduces American readers to a highly-acclaimed French poet. Guillevic was born in Carnac in 1907 of peasant stock. He sees the profoundly austere Breton landscapes (and all else in life) not as incidental backgrounds, but as elemental, living presences. His poems embody his indignation at the use and misuse of some human beings by others--as well as his cold and clear understanding of historical process. Like William Carlos Williams, he has a sharp eye, and as Miss Levertov points out in her introduction, "the simplicity of diction, the plain and hard meaning of things without descriptive qualification, reverberates, in the highly charged condensation of Guillevic's poems, with the ambiguity, the unfathomable mystery of natural objects." In translating these poems, Denise Levertov has drawn upon the affinity that exists between her own style and Guillevic's. She has attained comparable effects of concision and clarity and has reproduced with great subtlety the characteristic rhythm and cadence patterns of the French originals.

Denise Levertov's Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 brings under one cover the first published works of a poet who, though born and raised in Great Britain, has long held a distinctive place in postwar American letters. Initiating a major literary undertaking, the volume includes a group of hitherto ungathered poems, selections from Ms. Levertov's earliest book, The Double Image (1946), published in London, and her three following collections in their entirety: Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960). Living in the United States since the late 1940s, Ms. Levertov has often been associated with the Black Mountain poets, while from the mid- 1960s onward she has been one of the foremost activists in the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements. Yet even in her more "political" poems, her dominant perception has continued to be of the intricate beauty, the mystery of life as it is lived. In announcing Ms. Levertov the winner of the 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Hayden Carruth said of her: "For twenty-five years Denise Levertov has been one of our most prominent poets... Today she is a woman at the crest of her maturity, acute in perceptions, wise in responses, and an artist, moreover, whose technique has kept pace with her personal development." With Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960, readers have the opportunity of following Ms. Levertov's remarkable poetic development from its very beginnings.