Evening Train

Evening Train, Denise Levertov's new collection of poetry, is her twenty-first book with New Directions and one of her best. It shows Levertov at her most moving and musical, impressive and meditative, addressing the nature of faith, the imperiled beauty of the natural world (her new home in the Northwest brings mountains, herons, eagles), 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", as the Village Voice noted, "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". 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". Contemplative, personal, universal, the poems reveal in themselves depth after depth.