Some of these poems, with their irregular and persistent rhymes and impersonal tone, seem to owe more to the Elizabethans and early ballads than to Olson’s sprawling, abstract, wildly discursive poetry and his notions of what he termed “projective verse.” The lessons from Olson are there, but assimilated, and poems like “The Rick of Green Wood,” “The Hide of My Mother” and “On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck” are as distinctly American and austere and lovely in design as a Shaker cabinet. One can almost smell the freshly planed maple:
For a point of etiquette,
when I observed she was digging
the neighbor’s English Privet,I said, it grows in abundance here.
As a matter of fact, she had it,
I thought I saw a rabbit,
that’s why I came over here.
more from the NY Times Book Review here.