Evening Train: Preview and Excursus

Abstract

Just as this issue of TLC enters its final stages for publication, New Directions is releasing two new volumes by Denise Levertov: New & Selected Essays and Evening Train (thus preview in my title will not be accurate for many readers, but retain it anyway because it better captures the spirit of what I'm doing here than would review). The first contains twenty-five essays, about half of which appeared in two earlier prose collections The Poet in the World and Light Up the Cave. In addition there are several essays on William Carlos Williams, others on the art of poetry, on poetry and its context, and, at the end, two essays on religious faith and a closing autobiographical sketch. This new collection would seem to be meant to replace the earlier two, since they are no longer included in the list of the author's works that stands at the front of both new volumes. (It is not clear, by the way, why the three collected volumes of poems up through 1972 have not similarly displaced the individual volumes which they contain.) The volume opens with an essay that amounts to a little anthology of poems with which Levertov experiences, as her title says, Some Affinities of Content. That a number of the poets are from her newly adopted region, the Pacific Northwest, and that the book ends with essays on religion effects a kind of parallel between it and the new volume of poems, which begins and ends on the same subjects. Evening Train, my real focus contains eighty-four poems arranged in eight sections. Major motifs in the volume include the poet's move to and assimilation of and into the landscape of a new region; age and change; public events; religion. In some respects the book stands as antiphonary to her earlier volumes. It begins, for example, I was welcomed here, as though in response to an earlier poem about travelers, Knowing the Unknown (FD 6), which poses the