[Stanley Burnshaw] calls Mirages a public poem, and thereby indirectly explains one reason why it is so enormously moving. The poetry-reading public has had its fill of the confessionals, who treat their psyches as though each were a complete universe. Mirages is about something vaster and deeper than one sensibility. It is a series of meditations and conversations about the fact and mystery of Israel—the modern nation, with all its hustle and bustle, interwoven with the external land of Canaan and the strong destiny of those who have inhabited it at various times. To read the book is like seeing one transparent slide superimposed upon another, and then another and another….

The poem is written in a free verse that could easily slip into outright prose, but almost never does; Stanley Burnshaw's control is very exact. At times the verse rises to a biblical eloquence, at other...