Somewhere between Robert Frost's pastoral skepticism and Mikhail Bakunin's trust in historical progress, Hayden Carruth makes his way [in "Brothers, I Loved You All"]. He is, finally, a moralist, as this volume's long center piece, "Vermont," shows. He doesn't trust the difference between the contemporary and archaic….

For Mr. Carruth there is "more warmth and far less vanity" in his neighbor's greeting than there is in "people living for the minutest public dissection / of emotion and belief." Running against the tide of fashion and standing on the "absolute stone," the "abyss inverted, the abyss made visible," means that the poet must claim much for his language. That claim rests in part on the Vermont dialect, which he'd rather discuss than glibly mimic. But he also claims that Vermont Republicans and anarchists are the same: "names / are slippery, unreliable things." (p. 8)

His poetry will strike some as insufficiently dialectical...