SOURCE: A review of O Taste and See, in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 111, No. 10, December 31, 1964, pp. 18-19.

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...