A Door in the Hive | Evening Train - Softcover

Levertov, Denise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852241594 ISBN 13: 9781852241599

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

Denise Levertov has been called `America's foremost contemporary woman poet' and `the best contemporary political poet America has'. This new book contains her two most recent collections, A Door in the Hive (1989) and Evening Train (1992). In A Door in the Hive, her subjects range from paintings, music and landscape to terror in El Salvador, but there is no separation here between political poems and spiritual poems. A work of religious contemplation becomes an act of protest, and an attack on political terror is transformed into a prayer for peace and hope - no more so than in the powerful El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation, written for an oratorio on the murder by death squads of Archbishop Oscar Romero, three American nuns and a lay sister. Evening Train shows Levertov at her most moving and musical, addressing the nature of faith, the threatened beauty of the natural world, the horrors of the Gulf War, the pain and tenderness of love. What is remarkable throughout is the precision of her craft and her presence of mind: `Levertov's gift for detail is matched by the way she can make yearnings and ideas seem almost physical, as if she held them in the palm of her hand' (Village Voice). Welling up through these poems is longing: longing for peace, for the survival of her cherished earth, for love, for the experience of the divine which comes `like a strain of music heard/ then lost, then heard again'.

About this title

Review:

Her long dramatic poem El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation is a skilful blend of liturgical rhythms, quotations of eyewitness accounts of brutality, and a kind of folk song of the earth - chanted lists of traditional crops with prayers to the gods for blessing and fecundity. The poem partakes of so many textual models - ranging from Greek chorus to Mayan chant to 20th century media rhetoric - that what emerges is an archetypal blueprint of conflict not only between military aggressors and subjugated peoples, but also between human aggression and subjugated earth. * Harvard Book Review *

About the Author:

Denise Levertov (1923-97) was born in Essex, and educated at home by her father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who became an Anglican priest, and by her Welsh mother. She sent her poems as a child to T.S. Eliot, who admired and encouraged her. In 1948, she emigrated to America, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as 'the most subtly skilful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving,' and during the following decades she became 'a poet who may just be the finest writing in English today' (Kirkus Reviews). Throughout her life, she worked also as a political activist, campaigning tirelessly for civil rights and environmental causes, and against the Vietnam War, the Bomb and US-backed regimes in Latin America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1852241594
• ISBN 13: 9781852241599
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224