SOURCE: Tillinghast, Richard. “Poetry Chronicle.” Hudson Review 50, no. 4 (winter 1998): 681–88.

In the following excerpt, Tillinghast offers a generally positive assessment of The Bounty.

While perusing some thirty new books in preparation for writing this chronicle, and narrowing the selection to five, I have been struck by the vitality of new voices, the hardy persistence of veteran poets whose presence is all too easy to take for granted, the continuing vigor of the metrical tradition, and by the variety of what is being written and published. The pervasiveness of irony in many of these poems has also led me to ask questions about this double-sided approach to rhetoric.

Another question, in addition to wondering about irony, that engaged my attention while reading these books was whether poets chose to write what might be called the “situated” poem, or the “statement” poem. Both have long histories. An example of the statement...