Carolyn Forché is beyond question the best woman poet to appear in the Yale Younger Poet series since Muriel Rukeyser, whom in a special way she somewhat resembles. She is far better educated than most poets, not just in school, but in life…. She is also something nobody ever seemed to be able to find in the 30's when they were in demand—a genuine proletarian poet. Her father is a tool and die maker. Most of her later poetry is laid in the Far West, in New Mexico, British Columbia, and Washington and here the identification with place is as intense as in William Carlos Williams or Yvor Winters….

[Forché's Gathering the Tribes] is the poetry of a human being in her late 20's moving in perfect freedom and independence (not the same thing) through life experiences that are reserved for young males…. Her judgments of...