SOURCE: “Amid the Groves, Under the Shadowy Hill, the Generations are Prepared,” in Poetry, Vol. CLVIII, No. 5, August, 1991, pp. 280-95.

In the following excerpt, McClatchy offers a positive assessment of The World of Ten Thousand Things.

Does it make any sense to discuss these seven poets [Charles Wright, Charles Causley, Reynolds Price, Marvin Bell, Brad Leithauser, Debora Greger, and Peter Sacks] in generational clusters? They fall conveniently into three groups, but the approach is as likely to discover differences between the poets in any one group as differences among the groups themselves. Nor is convenience any sure guide toward generalization. …

What I have long admired in Marvin Bell's work is his willingness to think aloud, to speechify and speculate, to entertain ideas. Charles Wright shies from those impulses, preferring always to slip behind the detail, the image, the slow anonymous music of language itself. He may well be...