NORTHWEST
BOOKS

REGIONAL WRITERS
IN REVIEW




The Mystery of Deep Candor

Reviewed by Kent Chadwick
Free Press staff writer


Sands of the Well
by Denise Levertov
New Directions, 1996
136 pages, $20.95 hardcover


Of all the excellent writers who have migrated to the Northwest in recent years, poet Denise Levertov is the one with the greatest international reputation. Since the publication of her fourth book of poems, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, in 1959 by James Laughlin's influential New Directions press, Levertov has been recognized and read as a major American poet. In 1961 Kenneth Rexroth praised her as "the best poet of what is getting to be known as the new avant-garde.... In the first place, she is more civilized .... She is securely humane in a way very few people are any more." As an anti-war activist Levertov regularly used her art to protest against the Vietnam War in poems like "Advent 1966," which thirty years later still fills readers with the horror and outrage of burning human flesh. Throughout her career, Levertov has written definitive poems of astonishing breadth from political and social inquiry, "During the Eichmann Trial," to meditations on nature and art, "A Tree Telling of Orpheus," to remembrances of love and pain, "The Ache of Marriage." That last short poem draws this passionate conclusion about marriage:

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

Levertov has written so widely, so evenly and so well that the poems I think of as my favorites change with each re-reading of her books. Anthologists seem to have the same experience; they rarely agree on which poems are most representative of her work. Levertov's masterpiece has been the whole body of her writing rather than a handful of extraordinary poems.

That is what makes the unevenness of her newest collection, Sands of the Well, surprising. A third of these new poems miss the mark of her high standards. Some of the poems, such as the "Wall," have descriptions that remain out of focus because the scene is not sufficiently detailed. Other poems, like "Salvation," introduce important thoughts and moments in a conversational tone, but fail to bring the reader along into that thought or moment. "Threat," "Protesting at the Nuclear Test Site" and "Your Heron" are all poems that describe feelings but don't spark them. On occasion Levertov drives a poem to a forced conclusion, though the reader is not ready for such a neat summation.
Levertov's poetical stance has shifted in her recent books. Whereas in 1975 she was quoting a Russian poet in "Conversation in Moscow," that "The poet must never lose despair," and in 1984 she was writing Oblique Prayers, now she is writing directly about her Christian beliefs and her newfound hope, which she describes superbly in the middle stanza of the poem "A Blessing:"

Waking and sleeping, there was grace, reassurance,
during the hours of darkness:
a change in perception, such as we read of
in 19th-century stories, when someone in fever
visibly passed from danger into a calm lagoon
of slumber, promising health.

The challenge Levertov has set for herself in Sands of the Well is to write compellingly about belief and hope--subjects more difficult to shape well poetically than doubt and despair because they are more easily lied about. Even though she has not met her challenge with every poem, Levertov is onto the solution in her wonderful poem "The Mystery of Deep Candor," where she wonders at the simple rhythms that the composer Haydn created:

rhythms
a child could keep -

only Haydn dared
make magic from such
morning suns,

Haydn's secret that allowed him to take ordinary joys and create lasting art, Levertov explains, was his deep candor. And that is Levertov's method as well in the best poems of this collection, in which she opens her inner life to us in candor and helps us to believe in her experience and wisdom as well. "Sojourns in the Parallel World" successfully explains why we so rarely experience the natural world directly, and Levertov's argument sparkles with a rhetorical flourish worthy of Alexander Pope or William Wordsworth. She writes that when we "lose track of our own obsessions,"

-- then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles breaks free.

In "For Whom the Gods Love Less" Levertov confides her panic when she discovered her new poems were following the same paths as ones decades earlier followed, and reveals the hard, honest questions she asked herself: ""Have I outlived my vocation? Said already / all that was mine to say?'" Her answer to herself was to continue as Cezanne had continued to paint Monte Ste. Victoire again and again, and in that daily grappling with the muse to demand some "reluctant blessing" as Jacob did from the angel. It is then that she finds a new "inflection of light" or "wing of shadow" that is yet unvoiced and dependent upon her talent to describe it into being.

At age 72, Levertov is no longer writing sensual poems of the body, like her earlier "Hypocrite Women" or "What She Could Not Tell Him." She notes this change in her poignant poem "The Trace." Her "wildest, most painful longing" for "one to two, yes three men" in her life still retains:

some fragrance of those times,
like a box where once
the leaves of an exotic herb were kept,
an herb of varied properties, useful and dangerous,
long since consumed.

In the title poem "Sands of the Well" Levertov returns to a simple image that she has used many times in her books -- the well -- with all its profound, life-giving associations. "The golden particles / descend, descend" through the shaft of water, clouding the well. But as the sand falls to rest on the bottom, the water becomes transparent, just as our mind can in meditation. Levertov, however, remains a poet more than a monk or saint and reaches into the well with a willow wand to stir up the sand, cloud the water and watch it disperse again. That is the poet's vocation, to stir things up inside us, and Levertov continues to perform it masterfully. We are blessed to have her close and writing about our part of the world.

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Contents on this page were published in the September/October, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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