"Ordinary, Moving" is something of a tour de force in which a host of children's songs and folk-rhymes serve to sketch the whole course of life. With blunt humour and verbal highjinks they acknowledge the terrors of sex, birth and death, the struggle to digest individual and class differences, the conflicts of languages, race and religion. They can hardly refine our insight, nor are they really new. But they renew our awareness of the variety and tough vitality of both language and people…. Throughout we are reminded of poetry's roots in the play of language. And Mrs. Gotlieb does catch something of the "heyrube and racket of carnivals." Still, we are reminded that this perennial speech is also a kind of rhetoric and that it may become, as I fear it does in "Nothing," a sort of "busted slapstick." The heyrube of carnivals and even the songs of...