Olga Broumas, wishing to avoid timidity, falls into the pit of a desperately uncertain tone [as evidenced in Beginning with O]—sensational, full of bluster, pretentious, sentimental, callow. The callowness appears in her schoolgirl catalogue of respect: she wants to say "Great spirits now on earth are sojourning," but the sentiment comes out as self-conscious attitudinizing in a chapel full of niches….

All art, needless to say, is founded on what is juxtaposed to what and how the whole is composed. Broumas falls into a jumble of incompatibilities, where juxtaposition in haphazard and composition is that old Romantic cliché, the mount toward climax. (p. 72)

[The] transcription of feeling into stilted compliment is representative of Broumas's inability, as yet, to find a viable voice. (p. 73)

Helen Vendler, in The Yale Review (© 1977 by Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), Autumn, 1977.