Several of Jonathan Holden's books of poetry have won major awards: the Devins Award (1972), the AWP Award (1983), and the Juniper Prize (1985). He has also received two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships and a Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award at Kansas State University. Both as a poet and as a critic Holden struggles with important questions: the relationship of a poet's past to his poetic vision and vice versa; the potential moral outrage of trivializing real work by treating it as an aesthetic artifact; and the depressed value of poetry in a consumer society. A friend once said of Holden, "He prefers life to art." The best art, Holden would say, serves life by celebrating and illuminating the meaning of the simplest tasks and feelings. In pursuing these goals, Holden counters the influence of the cheapened and empty commodities that dominate the consciousness of a society immersed...