SOURCE: A review of Wild Dreams of a New Beginning, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn 1989, pp. 683-84.

In the following review, Leddy criticizes the poetry collection Wild Dreams of a New Beginning for being derivative and unimaginative.

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning reprints the volumes Who Are We Now? (1976) and Landscapes of Living & Dying (1979). Ferlinghetti's concerns in the poems are as timely now as then. "This must be the end of something / the last days of somebody's empire," he writes in "Director of Alienation," and the poems deal largely with cultural, ecological, and political apocalypse. An occasional piece works well to convey these concerns—e.g., "Seascape with Sun & Eagle" or "Reading Apollinaire by the Rogue River." Typically, though, the poems are a matter of predictable mannerisms: parallelism and repetition, sudden outbreaks of rhythm and rhyme and alliteration, intrusive puns, and countless allusions that are...