What a beautiful thing that William Everson's River Root comes out in a period of such sexual derangement. For what this epic and magnificent poem does is restore the love making between a man and a woman to its voluptuous and shuddering essence. It is as if Walt Whitman saw from the grave, with somber yet newly startling visage, that all the democratic vistas have long since been shattered like so many burned out tenements in the South Bronx, but still believed…. [Everson] gets to a vision of bonding in this poem that is enrapturing. Quieter, for obvious reasons (a century's difference), than Whitman, his celebration is nonetheless ecstatic, ceremonial and deeply erotic.

In a most intelligent foreword, the poet speaks of this work as "a monolithic anacronism, a core of primitive exultation out of the past." Its presence, however, sings, and calls us together.

Roger Taus, "Books...