Evening Train: Poetry (A New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Levertov, Denise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811212203 ISBN 13: 9780811212205

Publisher: New Directions, 1993

Synopsis

“Evening Train, Denise Levertov's twenty-first collection, carries the extended pilgrimage of her poetry into stirring new territory... Luminous, epiphanic... Evening Train leaves us floating on the mysterious lightness...of Levertov's ecstatic faith...” ― Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

At her most moving and meditative, impressive and musical, Denise Levertov addresses in her poetry collection, Evening Train, the nature of faith and love, the imperiled beauty of the natural world, and the horrors of the Gulf War.

About this title

Review:

In the title poem of this collection, Denise Levertov again demonstrates the arresting imagery that has characterized her poetic career. Our unchanging perception of self, she writes, is "the dimension / that moves with us but itself keeps still / like the bubble in a carpenter's level." The image does a lot of poetic work for her, suggesting the way the self is constructed, with hidden flaws, faintly remembered blueprints, and room for repairs and revisions. A number of these poems bring to mind Eliot's old term "objective correlative," and rewards the reader's attention with hypnotic language. Here is a longtime favorite at top form.

From the Back Cover:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0811212203
• ISBN 13: 9780811212205
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 132