[American Journal] is characteristically spare and lyrical. Hayden chooses his words with more care than most poets use, and there is also a kind of formal ghost hovering behind his lines, so that his free-verse stanzas seem almost to have resolved themselves into something more traditional. Their holding back is what gives them their charm, however. (p. 87)

What is most pleasing about his work is the delicacy and care with which he takes the common tongue, including nicknames and slang, and manages to place every word so cleanly in his lines that a kind of bright, varied mosaic emerges. On a larger scale, this is tied esthetically to his method in "Middle Passage" (A Ballad of Remembrance, 1962), which cuts and splices documents as well as the spoken word. But here, as in the central sequence, "Elegies for Paradise Valley," the individual tiles are plucked from the language we...