SOURCE: "Poets of Our Time," in Belles Lettres, Vol. 5, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 30-31.

In the following excerpt, Finch praises most of Baptism of Desire but expresses reservations about the final section of the book, objecting to the comparative "ordinariness" of the poems there.

These three books of poetry [Baptism of Desire by Erdrich, Green Age by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Toluca Street by Maxine Scates], written by three women coming from very different places as poets at the beginning of the end of our century, make a revealing cross-section. Louise Erdrich, a successful novelist who has written only one other book of poems, presumably uses poetry to write in ways not possible with the novel form. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, well-established as a poet, uses this volume to continue ideas developed in six other books of poems and three books of poetry criticism. Maxine Scates is new to the...