Mr. Burnshaw is a courageous man but even he, I imagine, would not have wanted the slogan "A Public Poem" printed so largely as his publisher seems to have decided. And yet he would be mistaken, for what makes [Mirages] so interesting and important is precisely that it is public in a way that poems have not been for decades. The poem concerns the Israeli-Arab problem in all its complexity. Mr. Burnshaw brings to it a complexity of his own which gives him the authority to speak. His own culture is deeply American-European as can be seen from his translation-work in The Poem Itself and his The Seamless Web, not to mention his earlier poems. But The … Web is underwritten with the Paradisal myth of man united with his natural world, and the poems return to the legend of Abraham sacrificing Isaac as does part of this work...