Tribal Magic

Catharine Wagner contends “indeterminacy is [now] our era’s dominant style and can no longer be seen as radical.” By indeterminacy, she means poetry based on disembodied language; or, perhaps, an etiology based on ideology. In the recent past, to be successful, the poet has needed only to be confused and a member, at least figuratively, of the “lost generation.”

Not so, Hoyt. Harking back to Stevens, Lowell, Winters, and Duncan, his poems attempt to make some sense out of the experiences of ...