SOURCE: "Song of Herself," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. V, No. 5, February, 1988, pp. 7-8.

Wakoski is an American poet and educator whose verse collections include The George Washington Poems (1967), Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands (1975), and The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13 (1984). In the following review of Breathing the Water, Wakoski finds that much of Levertov's work reflects a "linking of body and soul through God" while it also recognizes the attraction and danger of the natural world.

 Others will speak of her spirit's tendrils reaching
almost palpably into the world;
but I will remember her body's
unexpected beauty
seen in the fragrant redwood sauna … 

American poetry, like American culture, has manifested from the beginning an unlikely combination of the material and the spiritual. We are pragmatists, grounded in our physical world, but for some reason we do not accept this as a limitation. We continue...