A door in the hive - Denise Levertov

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'.