Artistic longevity is always risky. A poet who with the passing of years settles into a style becomes not a maker of poems but of artifacts. It is a pleasure to note, then, that with the publication of Life in the Forest, her twelfth book of verse, Denise Levertov continues to write exquisitely crafted lyrics. In their reverence for language and life, they make the reader continually aware that the poet's task is, as Levertov has said elsewhere, "to clarify … not answers but the existence and nature of questions."

Early linked by friendship to Robert Creeley and his Black Mountain Review, to Robert Duncan by shared imaginative resources, to Cid Corman, Charles Olson and Paul Blackburn by frequent publication in Corman's magazine Origin, to the Beats by various anthologists, and especially to William Carlos Williams, clearly a great source of nourishment for her as well as for most...