SPRING JOURNALS: Poems

Scattered throughout these poems are various personal remarks: the poet is forty-seven; he has just become the father of a second son; he is in love with his wife; he is a professor; he is Jewish-American. But beneath these surface facts inchoate forces emerge: a constant awareness of death and of disorder; a troubled view of life which gives odd, anthropomorphic shapes and intentions to the forces of nature (""The sickle moon advances with a special cunning""), while ghosts lie in wait in a variety of landscapes. In a long series of poems at the end of the book, the tenor becomes a more fevered search for identity among wars, witch-hunts, self-mutilations--a confused outcry that touches on many modern anxieties and echoes a formless fear even more terrible than the realities.