[The] resonances of Nature are very much at the center of [William Heyen's] consciousness—built, it seems, on the conflict between it and his sense of a moral identity in the human self: guilty, suffering, enjoying, believing. These are the complexities of the lyricist who is in any real sense contemporary, one supposes….

And yet the other world, not that of the poet's language but that of the impenetrable "numinosity" of things-in-themselves, material or animate with the poet's eye, his "making," is perpetually mysterious, too, no more ripe with hope than with disaster. (p. 70)

[One] might too easily conclude that his metier is a variety of American poetic naturalism, Transcendental in its inheritance, essentially at one with Emerson and Whitman, ("And nature sends us back, in our time, not only to God, but to ourselves."). But that is not sufficient to the complex in Heyen's work, the modern...