NONFICTION - April 30, 1995

TESSERAE by Denise Levertov (New Directions: $17.95; 160 pp.) Tesserae are the small pieces that make up a mosaic, and poet Denise Levertov, now 70 years old, provides us here with 25 memories, presented chronologically, from which we can configure her life. Each of these fragments contains some facet of the poet. There’s a piece for heritage, the story of her mother, age 5 and living in North Wales, taken by her grandmother to meet an “ancient grand uncle who lived alone by the sea,” who once fought in the Battle of Waterloo with Napoleon. There’s a piece for imagination, in “Dumbshow,” in which Levertov tells the story of her mother, a young woman on her first day as a teacher in Budapest, watching a street scene from a window. There’s a glassy piece for memory, activated in “Cordova” by the smell of ironing. And there is instinct, first respected en route with her family from Constantinople to Venice via Athens, when a Balkan Gypsy tells of her sister’s future. Death is the memory of a gardener, “very tall and very pale, a man of bone and mist,” who “tends and destroys” the gardens on her street. There’s childhood hubris, when as a young activist, Levertov attempts to sell “The Daily Worker” door to door, even to a “thin, bony-looking man with wispy colorless hair who says “I haven’t worked for years. I’ve been unemployed for years and years. . . .” And there’s resignation to her calling, an oracle who convinces Levertov that “I did have something to give, something larger than myself--something which at all events would ensure me an interesting life.” As an adult, visiting Cezanne’s studio in Aix, Levertov recognizes the “vision of art, of making paintings or poems, a life of doing that . . . vibrates with the shimmer of heat he often could hardly bear but in which he went on working; it vibrates with the tingling sound of cicadas, awake when all else is sleeping.”