Denise Levertov is probably the best young poet in America today. She strives for technical mastery; she tries to make her poetry musical, she perceives the minute and the macrocosmic aspects of our lives. She makes us aware and she makes us respond.

Miss Levertov's most recent volume of poetry, The Jacob's Ladder, shows a preoccupation with the problem of communication. Not only is this her major theme, but she also sees communication as her primary duty as a poet. Good poetry, she says in "A Common Ground," is

not illusion but Whitman called 'the path

between reality and the soul,' a language

excelling itself to be itself,

speech akin to the light

with which at day's end and day's

renewal, mountains

sing to each other across the cold valleys

Perhaps one mark of the great great poet is the ability to communicate effectively without being literally comprehensible. When Miss Levertov writes, in "Night on Hatchet Cove"

...Out

stove, out lamp, let

night cut the question with profound

unanswer, sustained

echo of our unknowing.