[Anthony Hecht is a] poet of the dailiness of terror…. [He is formidable in The Venetian Vespers] because he takes upon himself, precisely, the burden of justice, however "poetic" its disposition must be…. The past presses on Hecht like an iron, terrible in its discipline. He is one of those who, unable to renounce the world, are immolated on acceptance, on facing up.

The masterpiece of the volume is a narrative poem called "The Short End," whose heroine, a certain Shirley, is wounded in her naive faith in "Constancy" and finds in a Drambuie ad in the New Yorker a revelation of her own perdition…. (p. 476)

Lexiconish, detached, deliberate, Hecht can leave a short poem still cold or spinning with pedantic fanciness, but in his longer poems—a great new direction for him—a ground bass of somber feeling begins to hum and grow ever more insistent until...