The nature of David Bromige's work is paradoxical, by turn highly personal and extremely impersonal. In the words of Bromige's mentor and friend, Robert Duncan, written to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1977,

He has gained the art and language in which he brings his readers deeper than any consideration of a personality to the awareness of a living man (hence in reading these recent books of his I find myself in a solitude and a--"Tight Corner," he might call it--edge or risk of Being, that seems even as it is most his to be speaking for a depth of my own inner being).

This response echoes in Marjorie Perloff's words on the back cover of Bromige's Desire: Selected Poems, 1963-1987 (1988) when, after noting it is "a truly original book" in which "narrative and lyric fuse to create configurations of great density" in language that "is extremely...