[A couple of years ago] Letters to Yesinin, a minor masterpiece, was hardly noticed; it was minor because its mood was so thoroughly bleak that probably it could appeal to only a minor segment of sensibility. But it was magnificently written, and I hope somehow it will still find its proper audience. Harrison's new book, Returning to Earth, seems not quite so successful—perhaps because it is more low-keyed—but still notable. It is a loose sequence of poems and aperçus in which the poet gradually moves away from despair toward a tentative, tenuous acceptance of the natural world, his own world of farm and woodland in northern Michigan. Still, the old pain is dominant—alcoholism, a blind eye, sexual disillusionment, the wrack of the land. "At nineteen I began to degenerate," he writes, meaning, among other things, that then he discovered the degeneration of the world...