Weighing in at almost 900 pages, this book holds just about all the Merrill you'll ever need outside of "Sandover." Merrill wrote exactly the kind of poems I used to think of as "real" poetry--stately, measured, clever & bittersweet, with lots of exquisite images to savor along the way. So why does this writing feel so stuffy and distant to me now? Reading a Merrill poem is somewhere between doing a crossword and shopping for antiques--you exercise the brain and always find something curious to enjoy, but even the most intimate ones left me strangely unmoved. I know Merrill has a legion of fans, and I can see why--these poems are among the best of their kind. But somehow they reminded me of the good chairs in my mom's living room--you could admire them, but you couldn't sit down. Still, the editors have done an excellent job and you'll enjoy going through this handsome book to make up your own mind.

Merrill requires no introduction. This is a splendid and comprehensive volume. It is a monolith, which commemorates the work of one of America's outstanding contemporary poets.

This collection includes some truly marvelous work: "The Drowning Poet," "Entrance From Sleep," "Poem in Spring," "Willow," "Walking At Night," "An Urban Convalescence," "The World and the Child," and "My Father's Irish Setters," to name a few.

I enthusiastically recommend this anthology. It serves as a means to remember that poetry of the Western hemisphere is capable of transcendent vision--that the Muses can still sing to twentieth century scribes.

Though occassionally less perfect, these poems scratch the edges of brilliance with every sweep of the pen. They are immaculate, dense, allusive, elusive, and always beautiful. Spend two days with "Charles on Fire" alone and you'll understand why Merrill was--no, IS --so widely admired. You should own this book.

Stephen Yenser's collection of poetry, _The Fire in All Things_, is a book of sound and form. The poet toys with common sayings and typical syntax to challenge his readers, to make them stop and think to find meaning. At times his work is quite funny, while powerful and elegiac at others. Yenser's poems often contain great detail, especially the details of people and places; by the end of the book, we come to know well the settings and characters of Yenser's life. He pays close attention to sound, using alliteration and assonance rampantly in the poetry, though it is not always noticed easily on the page. Yenser's poetry is clearly meant to be read aloud; so much pleasure can be extracted from the experience of this book by hearing it.

I listened to Yenser read his poetry from The Fire in All Things a couple of weeks ago here at the University of Michigan, and realized his dedication to sound in writing. Yenser's Keats-like implementation of sound never fails to keep his poems innovative and tightly wound. Except for "Fundamental, the poems in the Clos Camardon section are broken into three stanzas, a form that could have easily become dull had Yenser not kept each poem edgy through his unique approach to rhyme and alliteration. In "Reconnaissance," Yenser plays with the consonant sound "c." "Camouflage's" sound, besides its literal implications, hints at how Yenser later hides the hard k sound in "firecrackers" and "fractured." His return to placing it at the beginning of a word in "crackling" then becomes both refreshing and well earned. "Sentence" repeats rhyme without it ever sounding forced. "Eternal" is rhymed not only with "internal" but with such rarely used words as "hibernal" and "kernel," as the poem challenges its own idea of recurrence through sound. Each stanza stays close to its predecessor, its first line rhyming with the last of the stanza it follows. Besides causing these tensions, Yenser's attention to all the ways sound can work always keeps the reader's tongue and ears awake. Extending this idea of wakefulness, the first section of poems concludes with "Ember Week, Reseda" where Yenser creatively ends with the phrase "falling awake." Tying this in with the sounds heard in so simple a word as week (Yenser considers all three, the "w", "ee," and "k"), one sees how Yenser is always tweaking words (only the vowel sound is different in "awake"). Most impressive and pleasing is how Yenser addresses sound seemingly with little effort-the reader usually pleasantly stumbles upon his small modifications. "Carnal Knowledge" was another way in which Yenser complemented his poem's idea (or perhaps more accurately, complicated it) through sound. Leroy's coarseness is reflected in rhyme, the first stanza's perfect a, b, a, b, scheme being proof positive. But then there is the off rhyme of "ebony" with "way," and Yenser is off to playing his sound game once again. That small disagreement in sound (in the second and fourth lines) is then somewhat balanced by stanza four's "pour" and "sour" (which instead occur in lines one and three). Again, placement is Yenser's key. In the poem's fourth to last stanza's rhyming, the technique is perhaps best when "precise" exactly rhymes with "slice" while the crude comparison of a "hose" with an "esophagus" is made even more sickening by their close-but-not-quite sounds. In "Vertumnal," I am still confused by but nonetheless engaged in how he uses the "ch" sound in combination with vowels, as in "branch," "finch," and "bench." I want to say he has made the "defunct vineyard" he described at the reading all the more lively by playing with a single syllable word and its sounds. What pleases me most about Yenser is his willingness to acknowledge language as a sort of toy. "Vertumnal's" "master-baiting" and "no turn unstoned" from "Kerouacy" are two more instances of his fun. The next time I feel myself getting too wrapped up in the all work that goes along with poetry writing, I will surely pick up this book and read it through once again, aloud to a friend.