Fred Astaire and Louis Zukofsky, Tin Pan Alley and the Transcendentalists--these are among the muses of Ronald Johnson, whom Guy Davenport has called "America's greatest living poet." The claim, although surprising, bears consideration. In his concrete and shorter poems, in his book-length seasonal poem The Book of the Green Man (1967), and in the ninety-nine Beams, Spires, and Arches that make up his long poem ARK (1980-1996) (a rewriting of John Milton's Paradise Lost by excision forms the hundredth piece, a constellated dome over the whole), Johnson has authored a body of work whose ambition, charm, and intelligence are all but unmatched among his contemporaries. An "Artist of Abundancies," in Robert Duncan's phrase, Johnson is devoted to puns, to rhyme, and to bricoleur-mystics such as The Facteur Cheval and Simon Rodia, whose Palais Idéal in France and Watts Towers in Los Angeles, respectively, are models for...