A Door in the Hive

In her sixteenth collection of new poetry from New Directions, Denise Levertov displays what The Village Voice has called all her "virtues of musicality, mystery, and directness." A Door in the Hive addresses paintings, music, landscapes, terror in El Salvador, but the emphasis again--as in her recent Breathing the Water--is on the contemplative. Her dialogue between "the eager inward gaze and the vast enigma" deepens. Meditative, the poems are at the same time informed by a keenly felt urgency: "Extremities, we are in/unacknowledged extremis./We feel only/a chill as the pulse of life/recedes."