Candles in Babylon

Denise Levertov's Candles in Babylon evinces both the inner strength gained by a life of social commitment and the quiet wisdom born of solitude. The seventy-one poems in the book--her first full collection since Life in the Forest (1978)-- are grouped into several thematic sections that explore by turns the subtleties in the shifting balance between our public and private selves, the poet's voice ranging from the wry satire of her "Pig Dreams" sequence to the resonant grandeur of her six-part "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus." Behind it all is the gentle melancholy of the title poem and the poet's vision of peace.