Door in the Hive: Poems

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."