Most American poets worth their salt seem to feel challenged at some stage in their careers by the idea of the long poem, and indeed in certain honourable cases the challenge has seemed to be that of the unfinishable poem, the poem that can constitute the central experience of the author's life, brought to a close only by death. Edward Dorn's Slinger doesn't belong to this latter category, fortunately for him, but mortality is one of a number of metaphysical topics with which he plays in a poem remarkable for the sustained pleasure it affords. As an accomplished rhetor Dorn reveals his pleasure as well, not in his own performance, but in the agility and gusto with which his inventions perform their discursive routines within his spare narrative….

Part of the pleasure of [the poem] … lies in [its] easy accommodation of both low and high language. Such range...