Denise Levertov writes too many poems, too many journal jottings broken up into lines, a title plunked on top of them with the hope that some rhythm of composition according to "the musical phrase" (Pound) will hold them together. But in the best poems from [Life in the Forest] …, and they are found in its first section titled "Homage to Cesare Pavese," she works with longer lines and a discursive structure, yet avoids the breathless heart-on-sleeve manner that for me marred so much of her last three, politically obsessed volumes. In fact the sequence of poems about a daughter and her ninety-year old mother dying in Mexico, is as moving and intelligent work as anything she has done since "Olga Poems" (written about her sister) from The Sorrow Dance (1967). (pp. 262-63)

The single most interesting poem, also from this section, is "Chekhov on the West Heath," which begins...