When Doves Cry

"The disasters numb within us"

Many of the poems in a new short anthology of Denise Levertov's work, Making Peace , are more standard antiwar fare. Written primarily during the Vietnam and the first Gulf wars, they are at times more strident and self-righteous than anything in Sáenz's collection. Levertov is at her best when she resists the urge to clobber us with her indignation. The wonderful beginning of "Writing in the Dark," for example, shows us much about writing poems during such gloomy times: "It's not difficult./Anyway, it's necessary.//Wait till morning, and you'll forget./And who knows if morning will come." The brief moment of humor in the opening couplet contrasts brutally with the blunt truth of what follows -- how little we remember of Vietnam, it seems, when faced with the enormity of each succeeding threat, each new bloody conflict.

That fear of tomorrow never coming is largely dispelled by the best poems in this book, which fill the last section. Included here is a part of her longer poem, "An Interim," in which the adolescent speaker's mother takes her to the beach to recover from measles:

She read aloud

from George Eliot, while I half-dozed

and played with pebbles. Or I read

to myself Richard Jefferies'

The Story of My Heart, which begins

in such majesty.

I was mean and grouchy

much of the time, but she forgave me,

and years later remembered

only the peace of that time.