Sands of the Well

Author: Denise Levertov 

Publisher: New Directions (1998)

Sands of the Well shows Denise Levertov at the height of her powers — and graced with new depths of awe. In eight sections — “Crow Spring,” “Sojourns in the Parallel World,” “It Should be Visible,” “Anamnesis,” “Representations,” “Raga,” “A South Wind,” and “Close to a Lake” — Sands of the Well addresses the natural world, music, memory, aging, and belief. Her long study of the nature of spiritual insight here finds an ever more active professed engagement. In Sands of the Well Levertov allows the reader to sense the complexity under her perfect clarity of surface, and her music and precision bear us along to a new awareness of the “Primary Wonder.”

"Here [in Sands of the Well] she relocates her quiet ecstatic meditation of blessing and burden, gift and given, to a Pacific Northwest coast and range landscape of magisterial, consoling beauty."

–The San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle