Though much has been made of [Brautigan's] years in the wilderness, it has fallen to him, as far as his poetry is concerned, to be the popularizer of other men's work. Somewhere in [The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster] you will find hidden the sweetened and simplified faces of Frank O'Hara, James Wright, Robert Creeley, Dudley Fitts, not to mention Buddy Holly, Walt Whitman and all. He is the author of two original and poetic prose works called In Watermelon Sugar and Trout Fishing in America which have become something of a cult on the West Coast. Short, visionary inscapes on the American nightmare, they might indeed have required some kind of exile to complete…. Sugary, predigested and schoolgirlish, his naiveté is actually cynical it is so accurately researched to touch the dewy and vulgar adolescent heart. With his own heart safely given over to justified lines...