Sands of the Well - Softcover

Levertov, Denise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811213617 ISBN 13: 9780811213615

Publisher: New Directions, 1998

Synopsis

For the first time in paperback-Levertov's recent poetry, showing her at the height of her literary powers. Sands of the Well, first published in hardcover in 1996, shows the poet at the height of her considerable powers, as she addresses the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest coastal landscape in terms of music, memory, aging, doubt, and faith.

About this title

About the Author:

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was a British born American poet. She wrote and published 20 books of poetry, criticism, translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honors, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

From Publishers Weekly:

In her 21st collection, septuagenarian Levertov (Evening Train; Oblique Prayers) continues to find God in the natural world and in "human passions, cruelties, dreams, concepts, crimes, and the exercise of virtue." Nature, however, is what puts all of the latter in perspective and allows us to realize the divine. At their best, these poems, in the imagist tradition, transport a reader into the rendered scenes, the lines becoming like "oarstrokes over/ the waveless, dark,/ secretive water." While the last of the eight sections, "Close to a Lake," offers a heady brew of old and new testament faith, it is Levertov's more searching, personal reflections that ring truest: "...I lay low, evasive,/ imagining mortal weariness it's not yet time for." One feels, throughout, that the spirituality is in our own hands: "...when you seem to yourself/ nothing but a flimsy web/ of questions, you are given/ the questions of others to hold/ in the emptiness of your hands,/ songbird eggs that can still hatch/ if you keep them warm..../ You are given the questions of others/ as if they were answers/ to all you ask."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0811213617
• ISBN 13: 9780811213615
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136