Denise Levertov's Candles in Babylon evinces both the inner strength gained by a life of social commitment and the quiet wisdom born of solitude. The seventy-one poems in the book--her first full collection since Life in the Forest (1978)-- are grouped into several thematic sections that explore by turns the subtleties in the shifting balance between our public and private selves, the poet's voice ranging from the wry satire of her "Pig Dreams" sequence to the resonant grandeur of her six-part "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus." Behind it all is the gentle melancholy of the title poem and the poet's vision of peace.

Through careful analysis of Levertov's social verse, she demonstrates that there is a consistency and pattern in what the artist herself has termed the "poems of engagement." Denise Levertov began her career in England as a lyric poet in the Romantic mode, but even then was touched by the reductive nature of war, revealed in her first published poem, "Listening to Distant Guns." During the mid-1960s Levertov's social conscience, notably her strong antiwar sentiment, was reawakened by the Vietnam War. This reawakening resulted in several volumes of poetry that mirrored her concerns with the war (and political activism at home) and her perplexity at the nature of human beings - often great and compassionate, but at times cruel and insensitive. There exists a common thread in Levertov's pilgrimage from her beginning as a lyric poet to her status as an artist definitively in the world: she has always responded to everything within the compass of her experience.

"The first full-length biography of British-born poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997) brings to life a major voice in American poetry during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on exhaustive archival research of Levertov's entire opus and on interviews with dozens of the poet's friends, Donna Krolik Hollenberg's authoritative biography captures the full complexity of Levertov's entire opus and on interviews with dozens of the poet's friends, Donna Korlik Hollenberg's authoritative biography captures the full complexity of Levertov as both a woman and an artist, and the dynamic world she inhabited"--Front jacket flap.

"The poems gathered here span the last three decades of Levertov's life, their subjects ranging from Vietnam to the death-squads of El Salvador to the first Gulf War." -- Back cover. -- Provided by publisher.

“A mix of magic realism and Southern gothic, this stunning collaboration between King and McDowell…moves at a hypnotic pace, like an Alabama water moccasin slipping through black water.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Calliope “Calley” Dakin is no normal little girl. She hears things that maybe a little girl shouldn’t hear—and knows things a little girl should never know. Just seven when her beloved father is tortured, murdered, and dismembered by two women with no discernable motivation, Calley and her mother find themselves caught up in inexplicable events that exile them to Pensacola Beach. There—in a house that’s a dead ringer for Calley’s late great-grandmother’s house—another woman awaits their presence. A woman who understands what Calley is, but can’t begin to imagine just how strong her bond is with her father—even after death... Known for his chilling Blackwater series, author Michael McDowell left behind the unfinished manuscript for Candles Burning on his death in 1999. In the spirit of the ghost stories that Michael loved, Tabitha King has taken up where he left off.

The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods-this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons-it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden- they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.

This collection of 16 essays discusses the broad relationship of women poets to the American literary tradition