A Drink at the Mirage

"Between the discovery that there is a design which only his poetry enables him to find as he confronts the world and the discovery that such a design is a snare, merely a means of keeping him from further discernment, Michael Rosen is wedged, is productively pinioned, [ should say, for it is just this pressure—of meaning discerned on one hand and of meaning distrusted on the other—which makes the tension of these poems, a new version of the old wars between mind and body, memory and hope, ...