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Denise Levertov's Poems 1960-1967 brings together all of the poetry first published in The Jacob's Ladder (1961), O Taste and See (1964), and The Sorrow Dance (1967). This new compilation, beginning where her Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 (New Directions, 1979) left off, shows both a refining of the poet's craft and a widening of her concerns." We are living our whole lives in a state of emergency," she wrote in 1967. Levertov's staunch antiwar stand is reflected here in such poems as "Life at War" and "What Were They Like?" with what Kenneth Rexroth called "the special luster of a sensibility that never sacrifices humaneness to intensity." Side by side with her poetry of protest is that of celebration-"Song for Ishtar," "Come into Animal Presence," " Luxury"-and tolerance for "The Mutes" uttering "those groans men use/passing a woman on the street...to tell her she is female" as well as for "The Ache of Marriage." Here also are a meditation "During the Eichmann Trial," "Olga Poems" (a sequence in memoriam), and "Say the Word," the poet's first published story.

'A book of poems should have exactly the same fullness and risk and lay itself open to the same judgment as a life, ' says Allen Grossman. Of the Great House, which includes sections of 'A Harlot's Hire' (1961), Grossman's first published book, as well as his most recent poetry, presents an anatomy of the poet's working life.

In Elaine Kraf's witty, sardonic novel The Princess of 72nd Street, the Princess Esmeralda is sure of her royalty, her seizures of "radiance," and her domain--Manhattan's 72nd Street from Central Park West to Riverside Drive. On the other hand, Ellen (who shares a body with the Princess) has trouble coping with an ex-lover, his psychiatrist, an ex-husband, dining out, putting just one color on her canvases at a time, and trying to keep a radiant Esmeralda from being arrested. She has even taken to propping up large signs to remind the Princess that MONEY IS THE MEANS OF BARTER and DON'T LET STRANGE MEN INTO YOUR APARTMENT. The Princess, however, can be most persuasive: she wants to remain a princess. If only she could learn to control the radiances, retain the wonderful feelings, remember what happens...

Subtitled "The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet," this unique volume was the result of a series of informal conversations in the mid-1950s between Dr. Williams, his wife, and Edith Heal, then a student at Columbia University. In the relaxed atmosphere of the Williams home in Rutherford, New Jersey, the three discussed, chronologically, the poet's works as collected on his very own library shelves. "There was an air of discovery about the whole procedure," Miss Heal writes in her introduction, "the poet's excited 'Why I'd forgotten this dedication,' the unexpected appearance of reviews that had been tucked away in the pages of the books, pencilled corrections in the text, scrawled first drafts on prescription blanks." I Wanted to Write a Poem is, then, a brief "talking" bibliography, alive with the Williamses' memories of the circumstances in which the books were brought into being--in Miss Heal's words, "a nostalgic review of the early twentieth-century literary world."

Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the "geoglyphic" African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll.

This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West"-poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East"-poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali"-poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back"-poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the "backward" countries, and the "back country" of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.