Richard Eberhart owns ["Am I My Neighbor's Keeper?"]; it is marked with his odd and endearing brands. Or you might say it has wounds: many of his poems are like ads for hiring the handicapped…. ["Am I My Neighbor's Keeper?"] comes staggering up from a poor, slapdash beginning, and then parades in triumph, in acrobatic strength, as—caught in plain air—the profound corpse proclaims its tragic enigma: I am.

The echoes in the first stanza have an insidious appeal: if the reader veers to Keats in the first line—"The poetry of earth is never dead"—and to Longfellow in a more sidling way in line four—"mournful numbers … things are not what they seem"—then these responses hover in the mind disquietingly. The echoes insist; but a writer is sly—he knows you know and then goes on to use your simplicity. This wavering is an...