Denise  Levertov has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, including Freeing the Dust (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She was also the author of four books of prose, most recently Tesserae (1995), and translator of three volumes of poetry, among them Jean Joubert’s Black Iris (1989). 

On December 20, 1997, Levertov died from complications of lymphoma. She was seventy-four. New Directions published This Great Unknowing: Last Poems in 1999 and The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov in 2013.