As usual, Miss Levertov can demonstrate the clarity of image and illumination of experience that we have come to expect from her. Yet it is often hard not to feel that ["Life in the Forest"] would have benefited greatly from editing and more self-restraint.

In the first section, "Homage to Pavese," she is more conscious than elsewhere of subduing the "I," and several poems to the poet's dead mother are quite moving. In general, Miss Levertov is perhaps sharpest when observation informs the emotional rhythm of her lines; when she waxes philosophical, her work is often windy or verbose…. Other poems throughtout the book suffer a … paradoxical loss of focus, only to be redeemed in part by clear thrusts of perception.

Likewise Miss Levertov's "political" poems seem a mixture of personal guilt, felt emotion and jargon. We may share her outrage at the brutalization of blacks ("Pushing open...