Lyric Life

Denise Levertov's evocative, small, oblique prayer is an amazing piece of craft: an honest statement of the gray that is adulthood but also a wily little game in which she works us readers around and around and finally into the gray, almost without our knowing it. She gets us to the place of "I don't know" before we even know it and so accomplishes exactly what lyric poetry should: she surprises us with truth in language AND truth in form.