[The] most conspicuous formal attribute of [Dorn's The Collected Poems: 1956–1974]—eighteen years of sketches, narratives, travelogues, lyrics, satires, notations in the manner of Williams, and diatribes against American imperialism—is an exhilarating recklessness which leaves sentences unfinished and sometimes ungrammatical, parentheses unclosed, and the reader afloat amidst a welter of concrete particulars. This is not to say that Dorn is an indifferent craftsman. Nor are his best poems lacking in seriousness. Taken as a whole, they document a poet's painful confrontation with his American identity.

Dorn loves the American landscape, particularly the West. (p. 287)

But the West has been "ruined by an ambition and religion" and "cut, by a cowboy use of her nearly virgin self"; and Dorn's eye is as attentive to the "black diesel thruways" of Pocatello and the "dark smoke … from the morning fertilizer factory" as it is to American flora and fauna. (p. 288)

Dorn's...