Dorn, who notes that his work is "theoretical in nature," is vehemently not in search of the well-crafted poem, though his best work [in "The Collected Poems: 1956–1974"] needs no avant-garde disclaimers to support it. (pp. 32, 34)

Despite his esthetic caveat, Dorn is best when most focused, and the zeroing in comes when he speaks clearly of what is directly in front of him, either in memory or in landscape. His longer works like "Idaho Out" blur with rhetoric when the poet begins philosophizing, and sharpen instantaneously when he moves us with the portrait of a woman in a bar:

         So there you are. She is
         as ripe and bursting as that
         biblical pomegranate.
         She bleeds spore in her
         undetachable black pants
         and, not to make it seem too good
         or too unlikely near
         she has that
         kind of generous smile
         offset by a daring and hostile look….

Dorn's shorter...